A couple of days ago I wrote a positive (dare I say, enthusiastic) review of the account creation process at Zoho Mail. Using Google Account you get to sign-up in a super-fast way, but there is “a twist at the end” (citation).

Infact, the next time you want to login you either need to:

• sign-in with Google Account again. This will require you to grant access to Zoho again and again each time you login, making the identification a 3 steps process;

• sign-in with Zoho username (which you have selected when creating your email) and a password (which you don’t have).

As you can’t sign-in with a password you don’t have, you either need to:

• go through the password reset procedure, which you can find in the Zoho Account page. A password reset link will be emailed to you so that you can get to choose a new password. Note that you need to be logged in through Google Account (the only way to sign in you have at the moment), then go to Zoho Account and then choose a very counter-intuitive option (resetting a password you never chose) to start the whole process;

• go through the forgot password procedure, which asks you for an “Email ID” without further clarifications: is it your Zoho Email ID or the one you used to sign-up? Obviously it’s the latter, but nonetheless

We, as web developers, should put more and more attention to improve the experience of our users, expecially those who dare to try new (or easier) identification methods. Yesterday Yahoo published a research on the introduction of OpenID to its users and it contains no good news.

Technorati Tags: google account signin user experience zoho mail

I had a quick inspiration to check out the code Zoho Mail uses to implement the autocomplete feature that amazed me. This allowed me to get familiar with Firebug Javascript debugger.
On Settings->Common Settings->Mail accounts the field “Email ID” calls “confAccount(this)” when an /onblur/ event is triggered on it.
This little function checks whether the email is a valid GMail, Zenbe or Aol address and configures the SMTP/POP3 server addresses and ports automatically.
Have a closer look to the function loading the JS file and searching for “confAccount”.

Technorati Tags: analysis code javascript zoho mail