Hi Tulip team - I’m sure you had people working hard on the UI update that just hit our instance in the last day or so. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s a pretty painful step backwards in terms of usability. I’m disappointed that I need to spend time flagging new problems with the UI that didn’t exist yesterday, but I’m optimistic that you’ll take this free user feedback as an opportunity to make the needed improvements. FYI @rachel.shaw@kimberly@janani.rajendran
The new interface appears to cut off the “Name” field after roughly 30-35 characters. Since almost all of our app titles exceed that character count and have similar name beginnings, that means we need to click on each of multiple entries in the search results (and then cycle between their tabs) just to see their full app names. There seems to be no option to manually increase the width of this column. So a search that previously required one click might now require 10 or more. (See figure 1)
The search feature is much less efficient than before and takes more clicks to achieve the same thing. You now need to enter the search term, view a partial preview of results (which also has the names truncated beyond the point of usefulness), and then click “View all results” to see the full list. I strongly recommend just automatically showing the detailed results view without having to click again, as soon as the search term is entered - which is exactly how the system used to work yesterday. (See figure 2)
When you search for apps by name, it no longer shows what folder they live in (and it used to do this yesterday). This makes organizing apps much more difficult than before, as you would have to manually search through the folder structure just to identify where each app lives. Given that our instance has around 90 folders, this is more than a slight inconvenience.
The new interface seems to have removed the option to manually organize the folder structure in the left sidebar, which we relied on extensively - all of our custom ordering has now been wiped out by the auto alphabetical organization (i.e. “Archive” appears at the top of the list, which isn’t helpful). This has been pretty confusing to our developers and makes it harder to find key items. If the manual functionality isn’t restored, my team will need to dedicate hours to manually reorganizing our library and re-titling folders so that the alphabetical sorting matches our viewing needs.
The left sidebar now only displays folders, whereas it used to display both folders and apps. That means that now there’s no way to see a scrollable list of all our apps at once; instead we have to click into each folder separately to view its contents. Once again, this translates into a lot more clicks for the same task.
Thanks in advance for your attention to these issues.
Thanks @Dylan for sharing your thoughts on the recent UI updates to the Apps List page. While I hoped you would have been happier with the latest update, this is exactly the type of feedback we appreciate most from our users. Your post is being discussed internally by multiple groups. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the UI changes. Our team has more updates for the UI planned that should improve the experience far beyond that of the old page. I want to address each of the items you raised.
You’re absolutely right. The limitation on character count is affecting the visibility of app titles, especially when they share similar name beginnings. Requiring multiple clicks just to view the full app names in the search results was not our intended user experience. We’re going to update this in the next 1-2 sprints to allow for longer app names to be displayed.
Part of the update here was to improve the page performance when searching apps. This is particularly true for users with 100’s or 1000’s of apps. The 3 results shown are intended to be a preview. Like other search tools, you can press enter at any point to execute the search. You don’t need to click on “View all results”. This is why we don’t show all search results as the user types into the search field. In the short-term, we’re going to update how many characters of the app name are displayed. Long-term we’ll be investigating methods to display the full search results quickly.
This is a great call out. This is something we flagged internally, but we weren’t sure how big the impact on users would be. Your comment makes it clear that it matters to users with a lot of folders. Our design team is going to look into how we could improve this experience to bring it closer in line with the old page.
We did remove the ability to manually reorder the apps list. We made the decision to move to an alphabetically ordered list. This brings the design more inline with a traditional file system. We recognize this does remove some functionality you may have been used to, so we’re going to be implementing recent and favorites. Recents will be the most recently accessed apps and favorites will be apps and folders that you manually tag for quick access. This will allow for quick navigation to the apps or folders that are used most often.
This was an intentional design decision to make it faster to scan folders. We recognized that for accounts with 1000’s of apps, this was not a scalable solution for viewing apps.
I really appreciate you taking the time to give us this feedback. Please let us know if you would like us to expand on any of the points above. We want to learn more about how you were using the apps page, how you were thinking about app organization, and get a sense of what caused this to be so disruptive for you so we can think about these things in the future. We’re happy to share some of our design thoughts about how the Apps List page will be evolving in the future.
Hi Adam, thanks a lot for your quick response. Your explanations make sense and give me a better idea of what will be needed on my team’s end to keep using the system effectively.
Glad that you’re including this in your upcoming development. This is the most important/annoying item in the list which is why I put it first, so I’ll be happy to see once it’s fixed.
It’s helpful to know that you can hit enter to see all results and reduce the clicks needed - I just wasn’t aware since the old interface didn’t work that way. (You might consider including a prompt for the keyboard shortcut so new users know that’s an option.)
I definitely think this is important as a user, and hope to see it reinstated soon. It’s pretty typical of folder search features (like in Windows or Mac OS file browsers).
I understand about this, although it will require more cleanup on our end to get back to the point we were at before it was alphabetized. Favorites would be a welcome addition.
I sort of see the rationale here, and we can learn to manage without this one, although I stand by my initial feedback.
Looking forward to seeing at least item 1 and hopefully 3 fixed soon - @janani.rajendran and I will be keeping an eye out!
I would encourage you to do some beta testing to select customers prior to rolling out major changes like this, particularly for significant UX changes. It is difficult to for Tulip internally to simulate and anticipate all of the use cases customers have deployed in the field, so some limited testing prior to mass rollout would make a ton of sense. Or even some A/B testing.
Thanks Rick! We do usability testing with design prototypes on all major (and most minor) projects, including this one, and tested with a subset of internal and external users prior to rollout. As Adam mentioned, there are a number of additional features on the way relating to this page, which have been prioritized based on similar feedback like this from that testing process.
We always encourage customers to get involved in our product design process - we typically source from users who have commented on product suggestions, as well as folks who have expressed interest in particular product features to their account representatives. So keep commenting in the Product Suggestions category, and feel free to reach out to me at any time.
