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

Now that the new version has become the default, it's become immediately clear that it is S L O W. Initially loading the UI consistently takes 5-10 seconds, by which point I typically should have already finished with whatever I came there to do. At least as long as it's in this state, the new UI is a serious nuisance. The problem is compounded by 1Password not remembering my choice to return to the old, more performant UI, so I keep having to sit through this stupid loading page every time I want to edit something, and even after switching back, the big banner across the top of the screen proclaiming the imminence of the new version can no longer be dismissed, so it's a permanent space-wasting distraction.

Also, as has been the trend with 1Password's updates for a while now, more things are buried in menus than before, or deeper in menus if they were already in one. This problem is currently a lot worse in the browser extension, but I'm now seeing the same anti-patterns emerging in the web UI: almost nothing is possible with a single click anymore, and even 2-click actions are getting to be increasingly rare. While a designer may say it looks "cleaner," this is not a good direction to be moving in terms of actual usability for people who are just trying to get something done and move on. A lot of these menus only have a small handful of items in them, and probably shouldn't even exist at all.

1. Do you prefer this new interface over the old one?
   Definitely not. There wasn't really anything wrong with the old one, and the new UI is an unfamiliar thing I suddenly need to re-learn for no benefit. I don't use the desktop app for reasons that have been raised and litigated repeatedly on this forum in years past, so making the web UI "more consistent" with that is a bad thing as far as I'm concerned.

2. Do you see value in us rolling out this new interface of the vault item view to all 1Password users?
   I see negative value in rolling out this change, and would at least start evaluating alternative password managers if this became the only way to manage my saved passwords. I don't have a good replacement in mind, so I'd really rather not have to do that.

3. Are you experiencing any performance issues?
   Extremely. It's staggering how slow it is to load -- no other web app I use takes nearly as long to get to a usable state.

4. How often do you use the vault item view in 1Password.com?
   Any time I need to do anything other than auto-filling form fields. I primarily use 1Pass through the browser extension, so since that doesn't support editing directly, 1Password.com is the only realistic option I have to make any changes to anything. Without it, 1Pass is effectively read-only as far as I'm concerned.

In general, I place a high value on stability, especially with software as critical as my password manager. While genuinely useful updates are still a good thing, UI changes that don't directly fix bugs are almost always going to be unwelcome. I'm not exaggerating when I say a 10 second load time is longer than I should have been on the page at all -- I routinely make changes to something and close the tab again in less time than that. Moving things around and burying them in different places completely destroys that workflow, and forces me to stop whatever primary task I was in the middle of and focus on figuring out what nonsense my password manager has gotten up to today.

This is exhausting. I would happily pay a more premium price to keep the older stable UI around, even just in maintenance mode.