Installation usability - general feedback/ideas

denlinkd

I teach Zotero to hundreds of faculty and undergrads each year, though workshops, class visits, and one-on-one meetings. This year I have some students in my own class writing up a review of a citation manager.

A comment from one student's review (of Mendeley) identified a usability issue that has always struck me as a possibility: that the Zotero Connector buttons for Standalone on https://www.zotero.org/download/ stand out to users more than the giant button for Standalone:

Some of [the citation managers] such as "Papers" weren’t even free and when trying to use "Zotero", I downloaded it nearly eight times without being able to get it to work on any of my browsers. It is safe to say that I am not the most tech-savy person in the world, but I felt I should not have to be for something as simple as this. It was not until coming to Mendeley where I was actually able to get the program downloaded and working.

Any ideas for making it more clear that both the software and the Connector are required? Perhaps making the big button for Standalone look more like a button and less like a big icon? I can only imagine how frequently this happens in the wild.

denlinkd

Also, I recognize that this is a website issue and not a Standalone issue. Feel free to relocate this post.

Also also, with 5.0 on the horizon, I recognize that this might be fixed soon enough.

Thanks, devs. Love, librarians everywhere.

adamsmith

So, I'm not clear if that student didn't install Standalone or the connectors. Is it really your experience that people don't install Zotero Standalone?
At least supporting users here, that seems to come up very rarely.

(you can move your thread by editing your first post, but also, forums categories aren't terribly important here).

dstillman

I've clarified the download page to better convey that you need both.

(This issue will go away in the future because we'll prompt users to install the right browser extension from Standalone.)

denlinkd

Thanks, Dan. I'm really not sure what this student was trying to do, but I suspect that he was only installing the connector. The new language definitely makes it more clear that both are needed.