One concern might be that if you give zip a pathname, it'll have that in the archive, and will want to unzip it there. So in your example, it'll want to unzip it as srcdir/file. That may or may not be a problem for him. On the other hand, if he copies it and then zips it, it'll be in the archive and unzip as destdir/file.
Really, although you can use zip on single files, it's really designed for making archives of directory trees. So he might be better served with something like gzip, that only compresses and doesn't try to know the filenames/paths.
