Design language

@danvpeterson thanks for that response. It was honestly the most empathetic and fair response we've received. The rest have just been the found and @ben belittling users for their design tastes.

I just hope you can work within Electron to make it feel more like a Mac app and perform more like a native app.

@danvpeterson Thanks so much for the thoughtful response; it's really important to us to hear from the folks on the inside about all of this. And thanks, as well, for so many years of making an app that always felt like it had a very high level of "fit and finish" with the rest of the OS- that is something that has always made 1Password stand out, and I think that the reason a lot of us are responding the way that we are to the advent of an Electron-based 1P8 is because it seems like there is a very large gap between what the 1Password UI experience has historically been like on Mac OS, and where the new Electron-based UI seems to be going in that regard. Some (much?) of what people are going on about may be unfair baggage that we are bringing from other Electron/cross-platform apps that we may have used or been involved in developing... but I gotta say, just speaking from my own experience, so much of what makes a "proper" Mac app a great experience is just not possible using Electron. Or, if it is, it's far enough off the beaten path that getting it "right" represents extra work, which in turn begins to erase the productivity benefit gained by going cross-platform in the first place. And from an organizational/management perspective, once the engineering decision has been made to go cross-platform with the UI, it's all too commonly the case that Mac-specific fit-and-finish stops being a design priority... I think we've all seen abundant examples of that, in the past. Obviously, this issue is well beyond the question of visual whitespace, but I think it's where a lot of us are coming from.

To your point about custom AppKit widgets- it's true that many of the great apps (including 1P7!) make use of custom controls, but generally, because they are being built using AppKit, and are embedded within an AppKit view hierarchy, they typically "feel" like built-in controls. I'm thinking in terms of things like their scrolling behavior, how they handle/respond to keyboard focus and other events, accessibility APIs, menus behavior, etc. Those are the kinds of things that never seem to be quite "right" in Electron apps, and crucially they are also things that are very difficult to convey using screenshots- but they are immediately apparent when one is using an app.

And you make a good point that the whitespace issue is hardly limited to 1Password's proposed design, of course- it seems to be the way the design wind is blowing in recent years (just look at the ever-growing expanses of whitespace in each new version of Mac OS), so there may be a certain element of "Old Man Yells At Cloud" to my feelings on the subject! 🤣 At any rate, I'm very glad to hear that that part of the design language isn't fully baked in yet. Thanks again for the reply and for the years of excellent software! We critique because we care. :-)

Since this thread is titled "Design Language" I wanted to pop in as one of the designers here at 1Password. First off, I wanted to say thank you for caring so much, and to let you know that the design team is actively listening, trying to gather a lot of this feedback together, and will be figuring out how to incorporate it into the designs going forward along with all the feedback we've gotten from our early user tests, and other channels. Seriously, knowing so many people care means a lot. I've been here for 14 years and have helped to lead the design language through every version since version 2 and we all internally care a ton about this stuff and work hard to try to get it right, and to iterate and change things when needed.

Regarding some of the spacing concerns specifically: to mverde and 1P_Ben's points, the designs for those were actually done before we knew what technologies were going to be used to build the apps. That's why they are saying it would have been the same regardless of the technologies used. Being "native" does not mean using only standard controls and 1Password 7 used a ton of custom designed controls throughout (including the entire sidebar and many of the buttons and other bits). Many of the Mac apps I love the most use completely custom interface components and spacing, using native AppKit controls. As Ben mentioned already, we have been playing with some designs using tighter spacing over the last few weeks as well (and earlier too).

There are definitely some concessions we have to make in the design when using Electron, but there are a lot of concessions we've made with designs in the past due to what AppKit allowed, or at least based on what we actually had time to get implemented when working on multiple apps with very different frameworks, etc. It's a tough call and there are a lot of pros and cons on both sides. As a long time Mac-nerd, and someone that constantly pushes to just make the best apps we possibly can for our users (and ourselves) I've been on both sides of this and have had to acknowledge that it's much more nuanced than I originally thought, and that in practice both methods have their fallbacks and we need to move forward with what we think is going to help the most people with the knowledge we have. And continue to iterate as we gain more knowledge.

1P_Ben I'm glad to hear it's already under discussion, thanks for the reply.

@gothmog

Frankly I don't want to talk about the details of things that could make 1PW8 in its current form better. I want the Electron frontend thrown in the garbage. It will never be better than a native macOS front end. Talking about the details is a waste of time.

I'm afraid we're at an impasse then. I just posted this in another thread, but it has been an incredibly long couple of days so please excuse the copy+paste. dteare and roustem have, at this point, been quite public about being smitten with the approach in v8. I also know that they both believe strongly that no decision is final. Electron isn't going anywhere in the near future, but we're not taking our eyes off things. We're going to work hard to continue our tradition of delivering quality software for the Mac.

@StevenBedrick

Please count me in as one more vote in favor of less whitespace and fewer (or at least optional) dividers. In an app like 1Password, information density is key, especially on computers with smaller displays (laptops, etc.). Also, note that desktop interfaces are not touch-oriented- laptops and desktops have high-resolution pointing devices (mice, trackpads, etc), so it makes sense to put UI controls closer together than on a tablet or phone UI.

Many thanks. This is great feedback. I know our design team has already been brainstorming on this point.

Ben

mverde Please count me in as one more vote in favor of less whitespace and fewer (or at least optional) dividers. In an app like 1Password, information density is key, especially on computers with smaller displays (laptops, etc.). Also, note that desktop interfaces are not touch-oriented- laptops and desktops have high-resolution pointing devices (mice, trackpads, etc), so it makes sense to put UI controls closer together than on a tablet or phone UI.

1P_Ben

It's clear you aren't going to change your mind on this, but don't try to gaslight users and use passive-aggressive techniques like:

"I understand what is currently considered modern design language may not be to everyone's taste."

Who is considering this modern design? I personally think macOS 12's design is more modern and thoughtful than yours is.

You aren't in good faith looking for feedback, you are just responding to users to explain why they are wrong. If I was sitting in your seat, I'd feel awful about that.

Regarding preferences being a separate window, it’s hard to list concrete situations where that’s useful, but there are a number of edge cases where having the Preferences panel being modal (and not actually a window) is insanely frustrating, because I remember running into them in several apps over the years.

Electron apps consist of 95%+ of the offenders in this category, but a handful of native apps have been guilty too. Two examples are Slack and iTunes/Music, where it’s useful to be able to have the two windows side-by-side so one can adjust options and play with the the resulting UI in the main window until it’s tuned to perfection. These apps have modal preferences, so you can’t do that and end up with a laborious “ping pong” effect bouncing between the preferences pane and the main window, since the main window is obscured and can’t be interacted with. It’s also just kind of a waste of a full-fat OS with a nice floating window manager — this is a desktop/laptop, a device made for power users, not a smartphone/tablet/chromebook.

mverde I appreciate you responding to the "trees" but what I am not seeing is any discussion of the "forest."

Frankly I don't want to talk about the details of things that could make 1PW8 in its current form better. I want the Electron frontend thrown in the garbage. It will never be better than a native macOS front end. Talking about the details is a waste of time.

There's a lot of feedback to cover in this thread, so I'll do my best to address each and every piece. In particular, I'd love to dive deeper into the feedback on the design language, as that's one of the reasons that we decided to provide early access releases for 1Password 8. Before I do though, I want to speak to the concern about Electron influencing the design:

Whether the UI was built in Electron or SwiftUI it would look the same.

This… just isn't true. With SwiftUI, you get native macOS controls, and with Electron, you don't.

@toph you are correct that we don't get native macOS controls through Electron. I think 1P_Ben was referring more to the design language that we are employing. The design language itself would have been the same, regardless of what toolkit we were building the UI with. In other words, the amount of whitespace used and whether the preference pane is displayed as a separate window or a modal popover, these are not products of our choice to use Electron, but rather design-level decisions. Having you try these things out and provide feedback on whether they support you well in your daily use of 1Password 8 is of tremendous value to us!

@gothmog I will certainly share your feedback on the additional whitespace and the choice not to use dividers in the item list with our design team. And we are currently working on expanding the support for keyboard shortcuts, so you can expect that to get better with each update throughout early access.

@topher1078 strictly speaking, there's nothing preventing us from opening preferences in a separate window. We tilted towards displaying them in a modal popover because it seemed to fit well with a modal paradigm. For example, I'm either changing the settings or using the rest of the app, but never both simultaneously. Is there a use-case that you have that would be better addressed by having them in a separate window?

I hope that all of you will continue to use 1Password 8 and provide us with this kind of important feedback during early access!