"Add New" search suggestions could be smarter

Thanks for the feedback, @dgbeecher! That all makes sense to me. It looks like we have an issue filed already for prioritizing categories over other suggestions when searching in the new item popup, so I've added your vote there and mentioned the collections at the top as well. 👍

ref: dev/core/core#13073

ref: dev/core/core#14334

Thanks @1P_Rob! I appreciate all the hard work and quick improvements to the v8 betas.

Thanks so much for saying so! 😊

Another example: New Item -> type "soft" -> expect to see "software license" at the top -> instead see suggestion to create login for "https://studio.softr.io/auth/signin".

Softr.io is a website I've never heard of and looks like I will never need to make an account at. Meanwhile, I use the "software license" item type regularly. But even an avid user of Softr.io would only need to create an account there one time, yet might create very many "software license" item types. Both usage scenarios argue for prioritizing categories over specific logins.

I would even suggest that "software license" should appear at the top of the list for a search as short as "s". For me, this search currently bring up another random suggested login -- "Stew Leonard's". Again, I have no idea what this is. Sure, a user trying to create a login for "Stew Leonard's" might be amazed to be shown this as the top result. But how many such users exist? Wouldn't most of them create this login directly in the browser? (That's how I save logins most of the time.) And anyway, to my point above, they'd only be amazed one time, when they initially create the login. Below this login are several other suggestions that appear random to me ("Macy's", etc.) -- followed by suggestions for items titled "s" in other categories -- but nowhere in this initial list do I see "software license." It should be first.

Guess how many characters of the word "login" you have to type to add a new login via the new "add new" function?

(Answer: all of them!)

Hi @dgbeecher, thanks for the feedback. 👋

Your point about prioritizing categories is well-taken. We have already filed for our developers to take a look at this, but the additional detail you've provided is helpful as well. Thank you for the share!

Hello, it's been 3 years, and I see no changes to the issues I described above. Please look at the screenshot below and let me know if you think this is top-notch app behavior. 

My argument, as stated in previous posts, is that the category "Bank Account" should filter to the top of this list, as soon as the user types "b". That's because "Bank Account" is the only item category starting with "b". More broadly, categories should always be at the top of the list when creating a new item, because the first thing a user thinks of when creating a new item is "what category of item is it?". 

Do you really think that users who type "bank" into the "add new" window most likely want to create a new login for Sberbank, which wikipedia tells me is "a Russian majority state-owned banking and financial services company headquartered in Moscow"? I doubt that you think this, but that is what this app behavior implies. 

Even if 1Password suggested a more reasonable bank option, is that really the point of this window? To guess what login I want to create based on what I type into the search bar? Do you think users want an algorithm making these decision? (Did Sberbank pay to be listed first??) And anyway, it is not a smart algorithm: I already have logins for one of the websites suggested in the screenshot above (not Sberbank), so why suggest that I make a new one?

And besides, how often do users actually create new logins this way? "I think I'd like to create a new account at Sberbank today, let me go staight to 1Password (rather than sberbank.ru), choose a username and password first, and then click the URL in my new 1Password item to go to sberbank.ru, try to input my new username and password, see that of course it doesn't work because I don't even have an account there, so let me find the page to register a new account, input this username and password I already created, see that maybe that username is unavailable or that password doesn't meet their requirements, adjust those and edit the existing 1Password item to reflect the change, then finally create the account and log in." Or to put it a bit less absurdly: do you really think a user who wants to create a new Facebook account would really start that process in 1Password rather than at facebook.com? Because that is what your app's behavior currently implies that you assume! 

I am trying very hard to imagine the ideal user that you had in mind when designing this feature. The only way I can make sense of it is by envisioning someone who is brand new to password managers, has a dozen logins memorized or written onto post-its, and is inputing them one-by-one. So they press "new item", see the "try searching anything" field, type "facebook", get delighted when that's the first hit, and then replace the suggested password with "qwerty123" or whatever they had before. Is that moment of delight what you are aiming for here? 

And now setting aside the issue that logins are at the top of the list for no good reason ... why is the rest of the list so poorly ordered as well? Why is "bank account" so far down the list? Do you think I am more likely to want to create an identity with title "bank" ("We are excited to announce the birth of our son, bank!"), than to want to create a new bank account? I do see that the order of categories is the same as in the File -> New menu, so presumably the list is following some default order that is unaffected by the search. That should be fixed too. 

Apparently when I first reported this, I wrote that: "Only when I type "bank ac" does the new item "bank account" finally filter to the top of the list." But now Sberbank stays at the top of the list even when I type "bank account". See screenshot below. So in the past three years this feature has actually gotten worse. 

Again, please consider placing categories at the top of the list when filting the list of new items to create. Consider removing specific logins entirely from this list, or if you are to include them, list them below categories, and require very close matching from the search term. 

I'm sorry that this message is so long and caustic. I have tried to tone it down, but could not do so completely. This feature has the potential to be very useful, and yet gets everything so irritatingly wrong. Thank you for considering my suggestions, again.

1Password for Mac 8.11.22 (81122027)

It seems that your developers have decided they like the state of things as they are, given that they've sat on this issue for 3+ years, and in fact made it worse? I am curious to know why. Surely it is not to drive new customers to Sberbank?

In any case, I fixed this feature by adding a few macros in Keyboard Maestro, and it's perfect. Now, for me, CMD-N triggers a "conflict palete" (because I gave all the macros the same hot key trigger), which looks like this:

Pressing one more keystroke (B, C, or S) lets me immediately create my most-used items. (It would take 10 seconds to add another item to this list if I find myself using it often.) Or, pressing return opens the File --> New Item menu, and there I can type or use arrows to select any item I want. 

Creating a new Bank Account item with 1Password's native New Item interface takes almost 30 keystrokes: CMD-N, type "bank account", tap down x8, tap enter (on "show all categories"), tap down x6, tap enter (on "bank account"). 

Meanwhile, creating a new Bank Account item with my New Item interface takes 2 keystrokes: CMD-N, B.

I should have done this in the first place, rather than writing these posts and waiting for change to come. If anyone wants tips on how to set this up themselves (it is very easy), please let me know. 

@1P_PeterG @1P_Rob 

Tagging the two people from 1P who have commented on this thread, which otherwise has been ignored, about an issue which has only gotten worse since it was reportedly filed with the developers 3 years ago.