I was excited for this deal since it is something that is definitely a bit different than your average "collaboration" platform and really plays to asynchronous communication - amidst COVID, this is extremely helpful as folks have been stranded in different time zones, making things much more difficult.

However, my initial impressions are less than ideal.

Since Volley was also added to the marketplace, I really wanted to pit the two side-by-side when it came to Website annotations. Well, there is a very clear winner there - Volley. I know this feature is still considered "beta", but I fear that it's going to be one of the main attractions to Sumo-lings, especially for someone like me who wants to see how Volley and Zooc compare in that space. Some things that immediately stood out to me:
Volley uses an extension to drop comments. While you can't add other things like lines, circles, or drawing, like you can in Zooc, there was a degree of polish when using Volley's extension to add comments. Using Zooc's solution, you're met with an iframe that doesn't fully render the site - many elements were missing entirely from the site, which means...I can't address or work on them in any way. Additionally, adding comments in Zooc is a mess. Sure, it's easy to ADD the comment initially, but if you switch tools, I have zero idea how to add another, and if you want to address them by either deleting or resolving them, regardless of the action, they persist - and this carries over into other canvases as well - not a fun experience.

I was also under the impression (and maybe this is just my own stupidity...) that this was also centered around communication with collaboration features, but it's actually the opposite, such that most of the screen's real estate is leant to collaboration, with communication being only a sliver of it. If you switch to Kanban view, you're not able to create a new canvas, and the communication feature is removed as well - very odd decision.

There are also a myriad of other UX choices that are very odd as well, such as not being able to delete a canvas from the Workspace overview (you have to click into the canvas and delete from there) or the inability to move canvases from one stage in the workflow to another in Kanban view (seems to defeat the purpose of Kanban then), and many more than you experience as you use the platform.

Maybe it was my own expectations that sort of...ruined this experience for me, but using Zooc just doesn't feel...right. So many elements to it as a user just feels wrong and disjointed. And sadly, I feel that these issues, while not huge individually in regards to development, begin to pile up and you're met with what feels an insurmountable task in regards to redesigning the platform from the ground up in order to provide the polish it deserves.

As always, make your own conjecture! But Zooc rubs me the wrong way unfortunately :(