I also find it hilarious that the previous forum posts about the update have now been private and the links are no longer accessible. How bad WAS the feedback in those? Anyway I have it on good authority that the Front team hires special agents to take you out if you voice dissent, and many of my friends who reached out to complain havent been seen since.

This change forced me to use the light mode because of how bad the dark mode is. It also feels like this update was done to make it more difficult to use if you prefer to use your mouse. I don’t want to use shortcuts. 

Agree - I can’t use shortcuts - I disabled them completely because there have been some tragic missteps caused by them. (I have the fattest of fingers). I am also not really able to memorize a bunch of shortcuts. I have limited mental RAM. 

Quotes from my team since being forced to switch:

“oh this is going to slow me down so much”

“how do I switch it back?”

“where is everything?”

“where are discussions?”

“MY EYES ARE BLEEDING”

I have been such a HUGE advocate of Front for so many years. I’ve always called it my best employee. At one point my company tried to switch to something else and I convinced them to stay when I told them there is no way I could do what I do without it. I’ve recommended it to so many people in my network and have convinced people to switch from regular gmail or even superhuman.

I could never in my right mind recommend whatever this is now. 

SWITCH IT BACK!!!!!!!!!!! IM BEGGING YOU.

Honestly don’t know if this update was done on purpose, kinda feels like the entire UI update is a mistake or intentional sabotage designed to make Front as unusable as possible. 0/10 do not recommend

My prediction – they’ll sit tight for a few weeks until their user base starts hemorrhaging and the negative reviews pop up, then management will move into damage control mode. 

I know that I have already (reluctantly) started looking into alternatives...

How about an update to make Front look and work exactly like Outlook.   I’m not a fan of Front and I’m being forced to use it.   :(

Here’s a perfect example of just how bad the legibility and delineation between elements is in the new UI. The only visual distinction between texts being sent through the Front/Dialpad sms integration, and internal comments is a couple millimeters of indent? It’s even worse in light mode. I refuse to believe anyone user testing this thought this was an improvement to visual clarity and actual usability.

​@alhasan 

I understand your frustration. Our Product and Design teams will be sending further updates regarding the redesign, but for now I want to clarify that the Product Update was not accessible this morning due to an outage with the community service, not because we took anything down. Transparency remains something we stand behind, even when the customer sentiment is negative. The post you are likely referring to is the following, which should be viewable, all negative comments included:

Please fix these issues ASAP, I’m about to switch back to GMAIL, the design issues and accessibility of light and dark mode is awful.

I think there’s some hidden costs for Front on this too. While we’re looking into alternatives, we have also put a pause on any plans to onboard more of our departments and teams into Front due to this UI update.

Front, as it was, was a transformative experience in terms of workflow, info, and ease-of-use. It is now just a seemingly minor upgrade but at a premium price. 

The design seems to try to encourage Front users to learn shortcuts to perform tasks that originally were a 1-2 clicks. Like, multiple times I’ve seen the keyboard shortcuts heavily encouraged as part of this new update. If the only application we used was Front, then that’d be fine. But we don’t. We use a few different systems and platforms. This will sound silly, but this means that I don’t have my hands resting on the keyboard at all times to learn 15-20 new shortcuts to navigate around Front. I use one hand on the mouse and maybe I use the other hand to hit ctrl+e to archive messages, at most. But I need that hand on the mouse because I am often needing to open links that navigate to other websites, other systems and to work in those systems.

I think there’s been an incorrect assumption that users will just learn keyboard shortcuts to make-up for recklessly redesigning the entire UI and then releasing to all users in one-go. I think some will, but a lot are just going to try to use the system as they always have, and when it fails to be as productive as it was before, they’re not just gonna go “oh hey let me learn all these Front shortcuts.” They’re gonna start looking into other platforms. 

I don’t say all this to just berate Front. I love Front. The support has always been excellent. It integrates really well with other systems. It had a perfect UI and design, and the end of the day, the UI is the core of Front’s identity. Everything else can be great, but if the UI brings down the user experience like it is right now, it’s going to start to drive people away, imo. I really, really hope they reverse course, honestly. 

Please fix the contrast on the emails and inbox generally, it’s difficult to differentiate the emails from one another.  

As one of the biggest Front advocates, this is extremely disappointing. One of the worst updates I’ve seen and almost makes the entire product unusable. 

 

We NEED access to the old version asap. Listen to the feedback from your customer and allow us to revert back while you make updates. I have a team of 100 people who unanimously agree. 

This is terrible. Just terrible. 

The search function is no longer functional. I need to be able to search sub-inboxes without all the noise from all my other inboxes bleeding through. 

One of, if not the worst updates to come to an app. Everything that made Front so easy an user friendly has been stripped, and what’s left is an unremarkable Microsoft Outlook wannabe. The orange on emails that have come up from being snoozed comes out so faint, it’s almost impossible to see, blending in with new unread emails. Having to take extra steps to tag an email has slowed down. Not to mention if I want to snooze multiple emails, it is not one of the default options..making me go all the way to a drop down. 

Not to mention no longer having the options at top to quickly switch from inbox to calendar...

This is an update that no one had asked for, and to remove the old view is a slap to the face to Front’s users. Do better.

I concur with all the other sentiment here. We were planning to roll out Front to more people in our company this month, but now are deciding if we will do that due to these changes. It is less user friendly due to all the extra clicks everything requires now, and the contrast is pretty bad to be able quickly get an overview of your inboxes.

When is a member of Front going to reply too everyone here saying this is horrible. Just ignoring this mess. Be good customer service and either give us what we want or just come out and say “suck it up, we aren’t giving the old UI back” so we know to leave you all for good. 

100% this - we need access to the old version, it has gone from really very good to horrible.

This update is horrible, the previous version was really very nicely designed, that’s one of the things that makes this update so annoying. This isn’t an app we dip in and out of, we literally run our whole business from it, it needs to be useable.

My biggest problem is with the message bar - where did all the contrast and visual hierarchy go? There is no proper separation between messages and every element of a message - Contact /  subject / preview / comments is pretty much the same light grey. 

We need the option to switch back to the old version until this is sorted out.

Our team is really upset about the change.  I echo everything that is being said above. At a minimum please give us the toggle switch back.

Hi, where is the archived and snoozed tabs gone from my ‘Assigned to me’ section? I’m struggling to find anything.

Archived is now under “Done” and Snoozed is under “Later.”

Extra clicks to get to everything. Very frustrating.

Thank you, very annoying subscribed and assigned to me are in the same list but nevermind.

Here’s a bunch of feedback from my team, positive and negative.

It was a bit of a change to learn but I liked it at first.

They have moved a lot of buttons and consolidated them which is good and bad. Good because it cleans things up but bad because it is more effort to find what you are looking for under the ⁝ button.

Finding the Assigned to me and Subscribed was obnoxious since they placed the drop down collapse button on top of Open.

Subscribing seems less intuitive now. Before Assigning and Subscriber were close together making it easy to reference and utilize.

Overall, for those that don't utilize Front as heavy as others, it was an update that caused navigation and efficiency to drop.

The only complaint I have is that when you open it for the first time, it hides my inbox and assigns tickets

Can i switch it back?  In all seriousness, I don’t use it as much as others but I was just starting to use the tag feature and I don’t know where to find it now. All other features except commenting are lost on me. And the delete button is gone.

Not a fan at all! I find it much harder to navigate

I forget what the other one was like at this point. I make do with what it is.

Not a fan. I like the prior set up.  I think this change makes it harder to navigate.

I'm not a fan of the new setup at all! I preferred the previous version, where I could easily see the emails assigned to me or any shared comments. Now, I have to navigate through more steps, which is time-consuming.

I hate it, but I can deal with it.

Like the previous version better

This is feedback from our COO specifically:

I like the old version better, when they first introduced the new one weeks ago I reverted mine back.  However I can’t seem to revert it today.  I think it’s harder to use now.

--

Our team does not consist of “power users”, they do not want to nor will they ever learn to use shortcuts to do things faster.  We have people using Front that have various levels of technical expertise, the old design was very well laid out and you could see everything at a glance.  Now you’ve gone and hidden everything behind very obscure buttons, moved elements, reorganized views etc.

This isn’t a “please revert this” but instead this is a “our team is actively looking for other solutions if this isn’t reverted because you’ve now made our whole teams job harder.”

It really is fascinating to watch every SaaS company follow the exact same playbook.

• Changes nobody asked for that make life difficult, like:
  • Nesting ALL the buttons so it requires a ton of extra clicking for the most basic of tasks (like trash)
  • Ruining the search
  • Reducing contrast
  • Much more
• Telling people on their forum or through support that they’re all stupid/crazy for not liking the changes, condescendingly explaining why it’s actually better and it won’t be changed back. Ignoring support messages/not responding. 
• Banning accounts/deleting comments on the forum and pretending everything is fine.

What motivates companies to behave in this way? Whose idea was it that hiding all the buttons under a menu and forcing us to click more is a good thing? What’s better about this? 

Front has always had pretty extensive customization options, why now are we being forced to use this new version? 

Obviously looking for alternatives, Front’s price is way too high for me not to be able to have a simple trash button that I used 50 times a day.