Disliking the new custom field layout

apasternak
apasternak
Community Member
edited March 2018 in Mac

I use 1P to generate random answers for security questions, and typically store those as a new custom field section. The new layout is a significant step backwards. It takes much more vertical space.

I understand this was possibly done for longer field labels, but the end result is not a good one. I greatly prefer the old, more compact layout for this. Also, why would I want my section titles all capitalized?

Old:

New:


1Password Version: 1Password 7 Version 7.0.BETA-1 (70000001) AgileBit
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: macOS 10.13.3 (17D102)
Sync Type: 1P

Comments

  • Hi @apasternak

    I do the exact same thing and tend to agree with your view. I'll pass the feedback along to the team for their consideration.

    Ben

  • Hi @apasternak

    Thanks for taking the time to provide feedback. Please note that the edit layout is still a work in progress, and there are still changes to come.

    To answer your questions, one of the advantages to the vertical layout is the allowance of longer labels. I do have a suggestion though:

    Instead of having a separate field for Q1, and another for A1, you can now just set the label for the A1 field to be the question, and then delete the Q1 field. It'll then end up taking the same space as the older version 6 layout.

    And finally, the decision to capitalize section headers was to visually differentiate it from field labels, which, by default, are lowercase. But I will certainly pass your feedback along so it can be considered as we tweak the edit screen.

    Thanks again for sending us your feedback and we hope you enjoy 1Password 7!

    Cheers,
    Kevin

  • apasternak
    apasternak
    Community Member

    @ag_kevin, that's a great point. It's actually funny, I forgot that the reason I started following this convention was that putting the question into the label cut most of it off, leading to ... making it unclear which question this was.

    With the new layout, you're right that it's possible to update the field values for a more compact display, which I actually like. The problem is that it does require some editing, which I guess don't mind for a better long-term layout. As long as you guys don't change your mind again in a year and go back the other way :-)

    I'll hold off on any further editing until the final product, but I guess this part I could live with. However, still don't like the capitalization on the section header. It's pretty clear it's a new section, and it doesn't need to lose the capitalization I specifically chose just to make that visual point.

  • Hi apasternak ,

    Thanks for replying. Yes, I'll pass your feedback about the section header capitalization along to the rest of the team.

    Cheers,
    Kevin

  • balupton
    balupton
    Community Member

    Yes, I went specifically to this forum to request the forced header capitalisation be turned off. Not only is it a stylistic change, but it seems the way it is implemented in the beta is to actually run the uppercase on the contents of the header (as when you go to edit it, it is in capitals) rather than just the display. This seems forced behaviour, that a user could accomplish themselves, if they actually wanted it. To me, it makes things harder to read and to understand.

  • Thanks for the feedback, @balupton.

    Ben

  • yphoenix
    yphoenix
    Community Member

    Went to use 7b4 this morning and thought, WTF happened to the layout. Went and checked back with v6 and yep, it's not just me but what used to fit nicely and was easily readable and quick to scan to find the information I wanted is now a long list which is hard to parse quickly.

    There is a reason the left side (label) right side (information) format works so well - you weren't the only people to do this. See Apple Contacts, general form layouts, probably a gazillion of other products.

    Vertical layout sucks, is long-winded and hard to quickly find anything in. If you really want to keep it, then please offer both. Call them "Compact" and "Long winded" if you want. I don't mind most changes and honestly most UI changes that companies make are generally for the better. This one is not.

  • Thanks for sharing your thoughts, @yphoenix.

    Ben

  • yphoenix
    yphoenix
    Community Member

    Just tried editing an existing entry for the first time also and I must say I was rather shocked at how something that used to be so simple and easy to navigate has changed. Before: switching between view and edit modes were almost identical with just the appropriate editing icons appearing and fields changing from read-only to editing. Now the whole thing changes and becomes twice as long as the unedited version. I'm no UI/UX expert (although I do end up building them for a living), but I know a good UI when I see one and v4-v6 was a joy and this is anything but.

    If the problem really is long labels (which were truncated before) there are solutions to that problem other than going for a vertical layout.

    So far v7 hasn't given me anything that v6 had (from a pure functionality perspective, I'm sure it probably better under the hood) and has taken things away - like usability - so I may just go back to v6 until it totally breaks.

  • lobianco
    lobianco
    1Password Alumni

    @yphoenix thanks for the feedback. Just to reiterate for everyone, Edit mode is very much WIP at this point. It will look nicer and be much more functional when v7 ships.

  • danvpeterson
    edited March 2018

    Thanks for the feedback everyone! The move to labels on top was made for a few reasons. The big one is probably longer labels being readable but there are others in addition to that, like the ability to make the window much narrower. 1Password is often used next to other apps to copy and paste data back and forth and having a narrower item detail view is very helpful with this. Particularly so when you use the new window popout feature to have the item detail view in its own window. I'll never say never as far as going back to the side-by-side view, but I currently believe the pros outweigh the cons. I do admit that there are indeed cons to it as well though.

    That being said we will absolutely re-evaluate things if we continue to hear that it's negatively impacting users. So far the most feedback I've heard on the new layout has been overwhelmingly positive and I'm curious to see how much of the negative feelings might be because of workarounds that people got used to because of the previous short label fields like @apasternak mentioned above, or just due to change always taking a bit of getting used to.

  • rr0ss0rr
    rr0ss0rr
    Community Member

    Looks like the new layout is 2 lines instead of side by side. Any reason for this? The new layout takes double the lines and removes the column layout which was easier to read (especially in Secured Notes)


    1Password Version: Not Provided
    Extension Version: Not Provided
    OS Version: Not Provided
    Sync Type: Not Provided

  • Hi @rr0ss0rr

    I’ve merged your question with another thread. I believe you’ll find answers above. If you have further questions please feel free to ask. :)

    Ben

  • rr0ss0rr
    rr0ss0rr
    Community Member

    Why not add a "Compact" option to Sections and leave it to the individual to set?

  • @rr0ss0rr

    "Preference bloat" is a real thing, and so wherever possible we want to make the best overall decision and not have an option/preference. That isn't to say that we don't ever consider adding one, but the bar for doing so is fairly high.

    Ben

  • patte
    patte
    Community Member

    Since nothing is set in stone yet, I want to throw in my vote and opt for the most minimal approach you dare to implement. I know designers love white space, but I'm just too much of a pragmatic utilitarian. Getting to the information quickly and have it accessible
    within an area that does take up only the amount it really needs whilst being still comfortably readable will always be my preference.

  • @patte That’s fair, however the change was made such that labels could fill the space that they need. They were fairly limited in length prior.

    Ben

  • rr0ss0rr
    rr0ss0rr
    Community Member

    I guess I was brought up in an era that I like a tabular view of my data ... I'm not use to looking down a line to see the answer. This brings up another nit ... Why is the Label a smaller/lighter font than the field? When looking for information, I zero in on the Label then look at the value of the field ... so in my world, the Label should be in Bold and not the value field.

  • danvpeterson
    edited April 2018

    Thanks again for all the feedback here, definitely nice to see people so passionate about our data layout. Things like "easier to read" are super subjective as a lot of the feedback I've gotten from others has been the exact opposite of what I'm hearing here. Particularly with notes fields and Secure Notes as they can now take up almost the full width of the window without all the wasted space below the label on the left. That was actually one of the driving forces of the new design, especially with our new rich notes formatting there.

    Why not add a "Compact" option to Sections and leave it to the individual to set?

    Having multiple layouts is much more difficult to maintain over time. You essentially have to figure how to implement new features twice, any time you consider new designs you have to take twice as many views into consideration, etc. It's also interesting that you call it "compact" as the new layout is much more compact horizontally while the old is more so vertically.

    Why is the Label a smaller/lighter font than the field? When looking for information, I zero in on the Label then look at the value of the field

    I can definitely understand that although I think that depends on your point of view and the type of data you're looking through. If you have multiple fields with similar formats then the labels become much more important but at least for me, with most of the item types in 1Password, the fields are typically different enough that it's much easier for me to scan the contents than the labels. For example, it's pretty easy to tell an email from a password field (or a date, or URL, address, etc.) just by how the content looks without a need for reading labels. In those cases, prominent labels get in the way for me more than they are helpful and are more useful as supplemental information. The times that I would find a more prominent label helpful are for things like multiple URLs in a row, although even there generally the blue colored domain works pretty well in most cases.

    Definitely some things for me to keep in mind as we keep on iterating so thank you very much.

  • guillaumeserton
    guillaumeserton
    Community Member

    Woooo
    Just installed the new v7 Beta 5 and I'm just anxious with this new UI.
    It's a new concept to display less thing on the same size of screen. Bad, too bad.

    What is this new sidebar !!! Yes it's pretty but not efficient at all. In v6 I was able to see my vault, my categories and a lot of tags. Now, I get a scroll bar to be able to see the same thing. Not understandable.

    There is a lot of wasted space, why not use it?
    I agree with some other to get a new compact layout option

    Yes there is some good things like now it's better to distinguish in which vault an item is.

  • Thanks for the feedback @guillaumeserton! We'll keep that in mind for improving things as the beta goes. :)

  • patte
    patte
    Community Member

    Just a quick real world scenario:

    I'd appreciate it, if 1P would hide the label if there is none assigned.

  • ag_kevin
    edited April 2018

    Hi @patte

    Thanks for the feedback, including the screenshot! We'll be looking into that.

    Cheers,
    Kevin

    ref: apple-609

  • sswany
    sswany
    Community Member

    Also wanted to chime in on the new UI. After adding a lot of custom fields, the new taller layout is a bit hard to find anything. We use shared vaults at work and keep a lot of information in them. There's no visible grouping around custom sections (or ability to add one) so strength meters are kind of off on their own on the far end of the screen and things that you would group by label now all run together (i.e. controller…, usg… in the screenshot)

    I'm really hoping there's a way to choose the old style layout at launch.

  • iMacIIuser
    iMacIIuser
    Community Member

    Like @rr0ss0rr, I prefer a horizontal layout to a vertical -- I don't like having to scroll. Besides the scrolling, this vertical layout forces you, as you scan down, to mentally decipher which is a label and which is the data. With the horizontal layout, you can scroll down the label column more easily to find the label you're looking for. Or, to look at it another way, as when @danvpeterson talks about searching for the field instead of the label, it's easier with horizontal layout that way too -- you only need to scan down through the fields to find what you want (like a price or date) without having to also scan through labels mixed in.

    Also, I strongly prefer a UI with clear fields and separation of sections. When it's just light text on a bunch of white space, it's hard to read / find things. I keep hoping this dreadful UI fad will die, but it looks like 1P7 is hanging on to it.

  • Thanks for taking the time to share your perspective @iMacIIuser. We appreciate the feedback.

    Ben

  • glenn1p
    glenn1p
    Community Member

    Hello all,

    Condensing label info to fit in the old 1Password 6 layout sometimes was a problem. My method for security questions was to simply summarise them: "The first beach I ever visited" became "1st beach," for example. If a label was truncated because I'd narrowed the window temporarily, I could always click into it if I didn't get the meaning of the label from the visible part. And when it really long labels were necessary, they could always go into a text field above the data.

    One could go further and reason that a long label should never be necessary because really it's not a label, it's data. The actual security question is the data, right? (I did like my security questions in the label field though because the note wasn't so tall that way. I always wanted shorter notes.)

    What I get from the reasoning here for the layout change is "let's have a narrow window." Like a phone. Yes, you should make the secure note work on a narrow screen. On my big desktop monitors - no way. The whole point is width.

    Perhaps you need to consider responsive web design — what a great improvement it is over fixed layouts forced onto the user. Maybe it can't be done, but the principle is worth keeping in mind: Let users use the device screen width in the best possible way.

    I read above that the all caps choice for section titles came about because the vertical layout made the titles not stand out like before. Blame it on the choice to prioritise long labels. Labels win, readability suffers. The data should be the priority.

    Finally, these changes, and the enforced Markdown in the Notes field that eliminates multiple empty lines, will force me to spend time editing existing notes to make them as usable again. I've owned 1Password 7 for about 24 hours and I'm seriously wondering if I actually will invest the time in redoing my work. How about it? I'd like to know if a change is coming — no need for a date if it's on the way and will definitely come sometime — but are we stuck with this layout? It's June, I'm late to the discussion, and I suppose a decision has been made. Please let us know.

    Thank you.

  • AGAlumB
    AGAlumB
    1Password Alumni

    @glenn1p: Thank you! You make some excellent points. I especially liked "The actual security question is the data, right?", and your "responsive web design" comment. I agree with you in principle, but while this is "easy" on the web and iOS, macOS isn't really as flexible in this regard. But it's something to consider and strive for, to the extent that's possible.

    While I can't tell you what we'll end up settling on, these are definitely things were discussing with regard to notes and the display in general. As you can imagine, we have a lot of old (pre-Markdown) notes too. I don't know what the best solution is, but your comments are greatly appreciated, and, along with all of the other feedback we receive, are something we'll keep in mind as we continue to iterate on the design. Cheers! :)

This discussion has been closed.