Experiment #4 – New interface in 1Password.com’s vault view

Hi 1P_Rob , thanks for the reply. I apologize for my long reply in advance but the fact someone saw my post gave me extra writing powers.

First, I should mention how I use vaults. There are two main cases:

• Sharing credentials with family - Usually this means I had the "primary" credential in my personal vault and at some point I created a duplicate into a shared vault. I am copying them instead of moving them because I am paranoid. Therefore I would like to not see this duplicate item in the "all items" list. If I want to edit something, I have all the time in the world, so I don't care how easy it is to get to that item.
• Moving specific and rarely used items to a separate vault to reduce visual noise in my main/personal vault. For example I have a separate vault for license keys. There are 100+ items there and I may need something once every 5 years so it makes sense to move them to a separate place.

In the new UI, I directly get All Items in All Vaults.
This is actually counter-productive and counter-intuitive for me because the main reason I create separate vaults in the first place is because I'd like things to stay separate and not all mixed up.
A simple checkbox like "Open personal vault by default" would solve this.

Just for comparison, in the current UI I enter the Home page and I click Personal. I don't see much additional value in that page - it's just a screen I have to leave in order to get to the important stuff. If I can enter directly the vault view instead of Home, it will actually save a few seconds and I will not miss a single bit of functionality. Btw, in the mobile apps there is no tile that allows me to achieve the same result (open a vault).

BTW, I think the "all vaults" option is good for search if you have many shared vaults and for people who over-organized their data and created 20 vaults with no practical benefit and now have a huge mess to deal with (e.g. my wife). In the other end of the spectrum you have people like me, who regularly go and spend hours reorganizing and optimizing stuff so it is 1 second faster to get to the thing you are looking for. Therefore it makes sense to have the default option for my wife who will anyway never open the Settings window and that checkbox for me, who is paying for her account as well.

In summary, I am fine if the vault selection is a dropdown because I don't really change vaults that often.

This is already too long but I am getting to the Categories topic.

It is important to understand that sometimes you need something fast.
In many cases with 1Password, this "something" is related to MFA.
In my previous post I mentioned the Credit Cards category so I start with that:

Let's say I am shopping online and for the payment I need to enter a 3D Secure code that I get as SMS.
Unfortunately, I am doing this on my iPad so I am already pressured to find my phone quickly and copy the numbers within the next minute or so... but my bank also has a static code that has to be provided in addition to the SMS code. Of course, it is stored as a field in the credit card item in my personal vault...
... So I open 1Password on iPad and I get my beloved Home screen. This is a totally useless screen because it never shows what I need when I am in a hurry. So I have to open the sidebar (1st tap) and make the first choice: do I select "Search" or "Personal Vault".
I pretty much never go for "search" because I have 8 cards, some with English names and some with Bulgarian names (which also means Cyrillic kb) and I have no idea which search keyword will return the card I want. It might not be that big of an issue if I just remember the name I put on the item in the first place, but your entire product is sold on the premise I don't have to remember things, so no.
... At this point I am already nervous that my SMS code will expire or the darn website will crash (due to js/quantum reasons) because I am not actively looking at it... but I open the Personal vault (2nd tap). Now I get a list of 240 logins and the card I am looking for is at the 241 place. At some point I realized I can also search in that view but we covered that already. So, to narrow my options down, I have to open the Categories dropdown and select Credit Cards (3rd and 4th tap).
... I realize that I probably have milliseconds remaining until my code expires but my OCD kicks in.
These items are sorted by "date modified" and there is a month and a year between every 2 items. My mind says "copy the code and finish the payment" but my heart says "who decided that sorting credit cards by date modified (which I am pretty sure is default because I never clicked it) is a good idea" - cards are something you change every few years so my list is actually sorted in a round-robin fashion. And all those dates between items are just visual noise. And since the list is practically unsorted, I have to read the names of all 8 cards and pick the correct one. It's a good thing they are just 8 and not 30.

To be fair, it was never so slow that the SMS code expired, but despite the positive statistics, the stress is there every time. Also, sometimes I get the Home screen, sometimes I am directly presented with the vault view. When you are in a hurry, this is confusing as hell.

I could give a bunch of other examples, like speaking on the phone and having to search for something while the other person is waiting on the other side but I think you get the point.

Any UI is good when you are casually browsing your logins. When you start optimizing, things change.
I can see the new UI tries to copy things from the mobile apps but in reality it's the apps that need some improvement.

The iPhone app is mostly the same but there are key differences. There, I can always tap "Items" or "Search" on the bottom and navigate to a known screen (the Home button is frowned upon).

Both the iPad and the browser have the extra screen real estate to accommodate additional 10 lines in the sidebar.
In the web browser this sidebar is always open so this allows me to get to what I need in a single click.
In the iPad app, if I am in the Home screen, I first have to open the sidebar because there is no tile that allows me to get to a place quickly. My impressions are that this tiles concept is underdeveloped and does not improve efficiency.

I cannot comment on the desktop app, because the last version I used 10 years ago was 1Password 3 for Windows... but I am sure it is great :)