New Front Update--Opinions

Burying the title of the objects is annoying. We have order numbers and other numbers linked to conversations, so seeing exactly which thing is linked at a glance was helpful.

I don’t see anything in the UI update that actually improves UX for us, except that we can now see what inbox a conversation was moved from.

With all due respect, I have to admit that this new update is flat out awful. I see almost no upside at all. Everything was just made more difficult for seemingly no reason. Why add an extra step to search for mail? What is the point of hiding away the calendar? Just seems very clunky and awkward.

Does anyone know if there is a way to revert to the older version of the application?

Edit: I found the button to toggle the versions. Will definitely be going back until this is cleaned up or my option to do so is taken away.

It’s very disappointing. Multiple clicks for nearly every operation that used to be one click. Tags, new email and search all take more time than they used to. Also, if you do the dark version, like me, you can now barely tell the different between a bolded and non-bolded inbox, so it’s hard to tell when there’s new messages.

Most of it seems like change for the sake of change rather than anything with useful benefits.

I finally gave in this morning and turned off the new version toggle. I don’t expect them to completely trash the update, but I sure hope they can streamline some of these operations back to what their users are accustomed to.

Thank you all for this feedback! 

We are recording and reviewing all feedback shared about the new experience, and will continue to refine and improve the new layout in the coming weeks. This is just the beginning of the new layout. 

So far, I’m gathering: 

-Search is more laborious 

-Bring back Discussions category in the left panel

-Bring back icons for different app pages (I should note we did roll out shortcuts for those to speed things up) 

-Display object titles 

-More bolding contrast for dark mode

This feedback is specific, thoughful, and extremely helpful for our team! I’ll pass it along! 

​@ryan_giandonato FYI, we plan to keep the legacy layout alive until August 5, and we’ll continue to iterate on the new layout based on feedback we receive!

​@PhoebeatFront The shortcuts are nice, but for many operations not as nice as a dedicated button/icon to click on.

You need to remember most people are going to be jumping back and forth between Front and several other windows, so to use the keyboard shortcut you’ll need to first re-select the Front window before you can use the shortcut (whether clicking with your mouse or alt+tab). That adds another step to what could be a single click if the button was still there.

Another issue, I think the old version of the Compose button was far superior, with the dropdown for discussion or task. Composing a new email is much more common for most people, so having that as a one click option makes more sense than the new “+” button.

Everything said in the opening post is something I agree with.

I’m particularly not happy the Dark Sidebar theme has been removed, and the dark version is too dark for me.

It’s quite challenging to see in the list now who the assigned user is of an email, before it was black subject > blue staff name, it’s now black subject > black staff name 

If I had a choice me and many others in my department would prefer to stick to the current design and not have to have these annoyances.

We’re a small team (4 users) but nobody is actually using the new layout. It lacks the clear overview from the ‘old’ interface. 

You do get more screen estate but it doesn’t really feel intuitive. The search (as already mentioned here) is not at a place I would expect to find a search. The dark interface is too flat for me personally. It lacks the contoured messages in the list from the old design. 

There are some bugs as well (being on the starter plan). When I select ‘sequences’ there’s no way to leave that screen anymore in the new layout. 

The new layout is absolutely horrendous; it makes doing everything harder and brings no real value to the forced change.

Not everyone in the ecosystem wants to learn 20 shortcuts just to “work faster”.  If that was the case, I would have rolled my entire team out on Superhuman instead.

I used it for a few minutes, but when I couldn’t locate the spam or delete buttons, unless going into a sub-navigation, I was out. Wish platforms would just continue with iterative changes, not sweeping updates, it makes it so much harder for teams. 

​@PhoebeatFront I think it’s worth noting that most of the above replies are first time replies from users.

That means several people are frustrated enough with the new update that they are taking the time out of their day to set themselves up on this forum for the sole purpose of expressing their displeasure with the change.

Is there any possibility of getting the August 5 date pushed back a bit? I think until some of the mentioned issues are addressed on the new version many of us would appreciate being able to stay on the old one.

I left some feedback in the Help Center regarding the new design of the conversation list, but haven’t yet gotten any response, so I’ll put it here as well.

1. In the new design, the conversation summaries have almost no visual separation, aside from a barely visible gray line. This makes it cognitively difficult to digest the list at a glance. The old interface, with separate cards for each conversation summary, was a pleasure.

2. For conversations with a time goal, the date/time is replaced by the countdown indicator. While there may be some people who appreciate this, I find it frustrating to have the date/time information hidden.

3. When there are tags in the conversation, they crowd out the preview text, obscuring the context of the conversations.

4. When hovering over a conversation, the archive/snooze icons push away the other content in the layout. This is disorienting and unnecessary. (For example - if you try hovering over the time goal icon to see the text hint, it will move away, so that you need to move the mouse again to "catch" it.) Why not just have it as an overlay?

5. Comment previews no longer have a shaded background to match the way they appear in the actual conversation.

Everybody on our team hates it, it’s materially worse than the old layout and I’m dreading being forced to use it.

In particular I don’t understand why archiving a conversation is still called archiving, but the conversations now appear under “done”. I don’t understand why the search bar has been moved away from the location that every other business application uses and turned into a popover. I don’t understand why the compose button is ¼ the size and now has no label. I don’t understand why it takes extra clicks to tag a thread. I could go on and on…

One of the biggest hurdles we face with onboarding new team members is getting them used to Front. Most are coming from Outlook or Gmail and it’s a completely new workflow that takes some time to get your head around. These changes will make that much more difficult.

I submitted a support ticket asking that they delay the forced migration and drawing a comparison between the colour palette change several years ago that was rolled back within a week after it made the software almost unusable. The response was cordial but effectively consisted of “we don’t care, you’ll get over it”.

Hi all - thanks for sharing your feedback about the redesign. We know change is hard, and that there will always be differing perspectives about what is most important to optimize for in Front. I wanted to share a bit about how we landed on the redesigned version that we did and how we think about feedback. I posted this in response to a different thread, but thought it was relevant to share here as well: 

Prior to launching the redesign, we did heavily tested the new design internally and with a large group of beta customers. There were many iterations of the redesign shipped during the beta, such that we feel confident with what we launched. However, since the launch, we’ve continued collecting and aggregating all of the feedback we get internally. We always prioritize bugs that are identified first. From there, we look at the themes of feedback to determine how it impacts customer’s workflows. A few examples of things we have changed in response to feedback include: 

• Feedback we've addressed and shipped:
  • Greater visibility of tags in the message preview and message header
  • New chat indicator in message preview for prioritizing chats
  • Attachment indicator in the message preview has been brought back
  • Flattened message menu (Resend/Fwd more prominent) has been brought back
• [Coming soon] In progress:
  • New filters for finding items in Later/Done
  • Improvements to bulk actions page

We also understand that there is a large bucket of feedback that is preferential and may take some time to adjust to - things like color updates generally fall into this bucket. Right now, we don’t have plans to address this type of feedback as we’ve seen that it typically takes users a few weeks to adjust, but we’ll continue monitoring and collecting all of this feedback. 

Hope this helps - thanks! 

I created an account to voice my dislike of the new UI updates. My main concern is that it removes contrast and changes everything to a single color.
 

There is no distinction between the sidebar, conversations list, and messages within a conversation anymore. It is all 1 color and looks like a wall of text. This is difficult and taxing on people with poor vision unable to see the minuscule shade differences.

The strengths of the previous UI were the dark sidebar for contrast, the distinct boxes showing the conversation list made them easier to differentiate, and the tags were more distinct as well. Please let me keep the old UI.

Im not vision impared at all but I now have a huge problem focusing on the job now due to the contrast and colors - sidebares, chat and inbox are just one big blur . The new inbox is a nightmare for me

Basically you say “we dont care - youll get over it”. Im now forced to see if there are other alternatives after using Frontapp for many many years

It feels like the option to stay on the Legacy view was removed way too early. 

So far from only using it for a few hours since the forced change came into effect, I’ve found the below that are hard to look past (ignoring the colour issues and style issues).

• Search - pressing the search button or using a shortcut is incredibly annoying, to then have the search panel pop up in the middle of the window is not productive. 
• Subject - The way the subject displays in a window that is popped out, before you could have the email in a window that is quite small and still see the subject line, now with how large the archive button is it’s condensed. 
• Compose an email - Now takes two clicks, should only be one.
• No counter for how many emails are in a thread so it’s impossible to tell what are new issues vs ongoing issues.
• Having archived no longer be a view to flick to from my inbox, now have to click down to “Done”
• More clicks to access spam/trash

I just cannot figure out how this new layout helps productivity or what benefit this provides except for if you are using Front as a ticket solution which doesn’t seem like it would be even close to the majority of their customers?

Yep, just telling us to adjust and we’ll forget about it after a few weeks.

I haven’t seen one post praising the new layout or saying it’s helped with productivity. It is frustrating to use and slows down nearly every essential process.

I’m just going to say, it’s bad and whoever designed this has no clue of UI / UX.

We have even less information at our hands with this new update, it’s pretty bad, the contrast ratio is even worst than what it used to be, making things harder to read.

BRING BACK THE OLD ONE!
 

A new update in my opinion is more than necessary, integrating things from the old version if you don’t want to completely bring the old one, but a lot of things of this new update seem really inconvenient, a lot of things that should be simpler now have extra steps/clicks, I agree to basically everything other users have posted here, but I want to add:

• Removing the “assigned, subscribed, inbox” options to replace them for “open/done” is really not helping with organization and productivity. 
• I was able to add tags to my emails in one click, now I have to click the plus sign or do a shortcut, really annoying. 
• If I hit the ctrl key to select multiple emails that I want to snooze, now the option is not there, I have to click at “more” to snooze them.

With all due respect, you should focus more on what the vast majority of your users are telling you instead of suggesting us to adjust to these changes, this is not a social media, this is a work tool and it’s affecting productivity. 

For god’s sake..

FIX THE CONTRAST RATIO ON DARK MODE… I can’t believe someone got paid to design this UI, it’s horrible. i use EVERYTHING on my PC (and all of my other devices) in dark mode. 

Dark mode for this new UI is the worst i’ve ever seen in my entire life. Honestly, whoever designed and approved this needs to get fired. This is unacceptable and is affecting the productivity of my entire team because nothing is where it’s supposed to be, this new UI is not providing anything new but also making things harder to find/needing more clicks to perform.

Why did you forced this update to all of the users? It won’t cost you a dime to have the option to use the old one, this is just nonsense and treating your users like beta testers. I do not believe you tested this on any old users because no one so far have liked this “update” (which feels like a massive downgrade tbh) 

If i was the one to make the decision here, i would stop using front right away and look for other alternatives, this update is simply BAD.

To pilfer an oft-used phrase from my husband, “Thanks, I hate it.”

This may be a quirk of my ADHD, but my physical workspace is an intricate tapestry of organized chaos, an absolute masterpiece of utilitarian clutter to reflect my inner mind palace. Every item I will ever think about needing is meticulously strewn about (I love a good paradox) in clear view and within arm's reach, forming a delicate ecosystem of productivity. When I attempt to tidy up and squirrel things away into tidy little drawers and container, my efficiency absolutely tanks. 

I find myself grappling with the same drag on my productivity in this neat, clinical UX. Features and buttons that were once easily accessible have been stowed away tidily into dropdowns and the most cursed of all menus, the three-dot ellipsis menu. This interface feels like the white, sterile, dystopic future envisioned in many sci-fi stories. 

As a harried purveyor of customer support in a 1:5000 environment, the tremors of my diminished productivity will ripple across the globe; a flap of the proverbial butterfly's wings. SLAs will be abandoned. CSATs? I shudder to think. 

But hey, I’m sure we’ll all adjust in time.

🤣

This is awful.

Don't know how people inside Front, that use Front, don't notice all the problems being mentioned here.

Maybe they do but they are being forced to use the new version, like us.

Please fix the colors and contrast..

This new Front UI makes me feel like I’m in a witness protection program. Everything I loved is gone, and I don’t recognize anything anymore. Please give me back my old inbox before I start writing emails by carrier pigeon, and I REALLY WOULD.