Protect what matters – even after you're gone. Make a plan for your digital legacy today.
Forum Discussion
dgbeecher
3 years agoDedicated Contributor
"Add New" search suggestions could be smarter
When I add a new item, and type "bank", I expect the first suggestion to be "bank account". Doesn't that make sense?
Instead, I'm shown a list of what I guess are "popular logins" -- various banks...
dgbeecher
1 month agoDedicated Contributor
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)