I'm a new user of Zotero and I think it is a fantastic tool for documenting research materials and creating bibliographies. I hope to see Zotero develop into a online research assistant program capable of facilitating tasks necessary for any research project. I have three suggestions to make adding new records into the Zotero library easier.

First, I think the 'link' and 'snapshot' buttons should be taken out and the 'create new item from current page' be renamed 'add current web page'. It took me a while to figure out the best way of saving web pages onto Zotero. This is because I didn't know the difference between the 'link', 'snapshot' and the 'create new item' buttons. It turned out that the "create new item from current page" button was the most useful for me. I think that this button makes the 'link' and 'snapshot' button redundant because the 'new item' button creates a URL link, creates a snapshot (thus permitting annotation), and creates the bibliographic record (enabling note taking). I understand that Zotero needs to be flexible for different users but I feel eliminating redundancy will reduce 'feature overload' and make Zotero easier for first time users.

Second, I think an 'add current PDF file' should be added as well. Alot of research material on the internet is in PDF, so simplifying the process of adding PDFs from the internet into Zotero will the program easier to use. While you can add a PDF file into the library and attach a bibliographic record onto the PDF file when you click on the address bar button (which is fantastic and I think that should be the default setting), sometimes that is not possible because the address bar button does not pop up. This means that I had to save my PDF file somewhere on my computer, create the record, then find my PDF file again to attach it with the record. My vision is that when you open a PDF file on your firefox browser, you would click on the 'add current PDF file' to save the PDF file into your library and automatically attach a bibliographic record on it. The 'add current PDF file' would be located on the zotero pane beside the 'add new web page'. Even cooler, the 'add new web page' button turns into the 'add current PDF file' button when you are viewing a PDF file.

Third, I think an "add file from your computer" may be useful. When I first downloaded Zotero, I wanted to add many files from my hard drive into Zotero but was discouraged by the effort. First-time users may have lots of research files on their computer that they want to add into Zotero, so finding an easy way to add them would go a long way in making Zotero useful for initial users. My vision is that you would click on this button, find the files you want to add into Zotero, then Zotero would copy the files into your library and automatically attach a bibliographic record onto each file. Again, this new button would be on the zotero pane beside the "add current web page" and "add current PDF file". That said, I now know that you can add files by dragging and dropping them directly into the Zotero pane and that zotero 1.5 beta can automatically fill in bibliographic information. I feel that both are intuitive and time-saving features, and superior my button proposal. However, the features are not that obvious for users. I think that the documentation for first-time users should make it clear that users can add files into Zotero by dragging and dropping the files into the pane and show users how to use the 'fill metadata' feature in 1.5.

Well, these are some of my suggestions. I look forward to using zotero 1.5 when it comes out of beta mode and future incarnations of zotero!