New Front Update--Opinions

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.