1PW8 - Missing Category view in left bar

I also miss the Categories showing on the left side. I use that for at a glace of what I have in my vault. I also like knowing at a glance how many items I have there. There is not a quick way to see the total number if items in a category. Please bring back the option to browse categories on the left as a personal preference option.

We will definitely keep this feedback in mind and I appreciate all of you posting here. @andmade, a way to look at all "untagged" items is something we've heard elsewhere too and will be looking into. No promises, but it's something that is on my mind as well. Thanks again ❤️

@danvpeterson

Thank you for the explanation, Dan (and Andrew). I had not considered the drag and drop piece before, and it makes a lot of sense.

To be perfectly honest, I had not actually thought you could drag items to places in the sidebar. Like for moving between vaults, at least in 1P7 on Windows, I believe you had to right-click > move item > select vault or something similar. Maybe you always could though! Seeing this, I'm kind of tempted to start moving things into tags...maybe if there were an easy way to filter all the items without tags, since I do items with tags that I think 1Password added automatically.

zchrykng yes - that's my point too. Bring it back please 😊

My experience with Categories is that I will know I need a SSN for instance so will just click on the category rather than trying to search for it. Since the person's name might appear on multiple items, making it harder to just search for. Sure, you can get something similar with the drop-down menu, but it is less obvious, more clicks, etc.

I don't know how universal this is, but I suspect that most users only have one 1Password account and rarely need to switch between different ones. I have several vaults, but 99.9% of the time I don't care what specific vault I'm in, I only care if I need to check if certain people have access to a shared item or if I want to copy an item to a different vault to share is with people.

Assuming this interface doesn't change, I can probably work around some of my complaints by adding tags to things, etc. But definitely preferred the previous arrangement.

Thanks for the thoughts here telephoneman2 and @andmade! We moved categories from the sidebar, to the top of the item list for a few reasons. ag_andrew touched on some of this already but I'll try to go in a bit deeper from a designer's perspective (my own).

In 1Password 7 for Mac, we got a lot of feedback around the sidebar organization being confusing. Trying to use that area for vaults, tags, and categories was found to be awkward for a lot of folks and not ideal or easily learnable for new users. We started looking more and more into how people use vaults, tags, and categories via user research, customer support interactions, and internal discussions. The more we looked at it the more it seemed to become clear that tags and vaults are thought of for organization, and they fit the sidebar concept very well for most because they want to be able to drag and drop things to them, create new ones for sharing or just their own organization mental models, and it fit in with the thoughts most people we spoke with had from other apps they use.

Item categories we found to be most related to file types in the way people seem to think of them. You can't really swap between them because some are incompatible with others, so they aren't really thought of by many as an organizational tool. You don't often want "all JPEG files" in your Finder sidebar for instance, but rather a way to find by searching or filtering to those when you need them.

This isn't true of everyone of course, and there was quite a bit of debate and other solutions discussed and iterated on. Based on our user testing and research so far, this has felt like the most easily learnable, and useful way forward. But as we see additional feedback from folks like yourselves, we will continue to think about improving how you can navigate the apps for all of these things.

ag_andrew can’t you do both?

Hey @andmade,

This is tricky from an information flow point-of-view. In 1Password 7, you always had a vault or account selected, so the sidebar could host all of the Categories represented in that vault.

In 1Password 8 we've tried to simplify the sidebar by allowing you to choose your account (or Collection) and then select (if you wish) the vault you're interested in.

Because the sidebar selection is now occupied by by a vault (or similar), it cannot also host the list of categories in that vault. So the categories had to become a filter on the item list.

This fits really well insofar as the categories become a true filter on the item list you are viewing, but it is a change from 1Password 7 that folks will need to try out for a bit and let us know how it feels.

I too would prefer if they would move back, but they don't seem open to changing it. I don't use Tags or Switch Vaults often, so the sidebar is really kind of useless to me.

Hey telephoneman2, thanks for trying out 1Password 8!

You're right that we've moved the Category picker into a menu above the item list. If you happen to prefer keyboard navigation you can use Quick Find to navigate to a category instead of using the category picker.

Thanks again and keep the feedback coming!