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

Adding a note about the latency - both on the mobile app as well as in the browser extension, everything feels more 'sluggish'... it's painfully slow compared to the old UI. My devices aren't low power either (Galaxy S22 Ultra on mobile and an i9-10885H on desktop). I experience multi-second lag consistently and when I work 'offline' in the Android app it freezes for 30 seconds+ when it should just use the data stored locally on the device.

Can I ask why there is a push towards a 'new' UI? My experience with 'New' UIs over the last few years has left me with an impression that front-end devs don't seem to be prioritizing lightweight, efficient, usable interfaces. What's with the bloat? I can't have my password manager get in the way as much as this new ui gets in my way.

SECURE NOTES, EDITING, HANGING IN MACOS
SECURE NOTES, EDITING, SAVING IN MACOS, THE SAVE BUTTON DOESN'T CLICK, AND NOTHING HAPPENS

We have rather large SECURE NOTES, and since we switched to the new interface, a new issue is occurring semi-regularly: when we go to edit a secure note in Chrome on Mac, we get a spinner for a very very long time before we can actually type in the secure note area.

Also new this morning when we go to click the SAVE button nothing happens.

1P_Rob

In my testing, when switching between the new and the old, it takes about 2 seconds to load the old version and about 3 seconds to load the new version. We will continue optimizing, but there are a couple things working against us that might be useful context:

The new version is a separate app that doesn't load until you click into it. The old version is part of the same app as the sign-in screen, home page, profile page, etc., so navigating within that app is snappier, but switching between old and new gives a clearer picture of total load time.

I just did some more testing on a couple different machines, both with fairly high-spec and very modern hardware, and I think I may have found why you're seeing faster speeds than I am: switching directly back and forth between the old and new versions, they old version loads in about 3 seconds, and the new one loads in around 4, so slightly slower than your machine but still but still pretty close together. However, that's not how I actually use 1Password normally. Most often, my method of launching the 1Password web app is by either creating or editing an item from the browser extension. Doing that a few times in a row starting from an empty browser window with the old UI takes right around 3.5 seconds every time, while the new UI took 6~10 seconds on one machine, and 5~8 on another. Looking more closely at the "switching back and forth" approach, another difference is that the old UI automatically loads the first item in the list, and the new one doesn't load anything, saving it a bunch of extra work. I'm curious if you see the same slowdowns as I am if you ask it to load a more complex view right off the bat.

In general, 1Password is different from many web apps because there's an awful lot that has to be done in your browser rather than on a server. We can't do much of anything until your data is decrypted, and that can only happen in the browser.
I can appreciate that on its face, but when you've already established a baseline of what's possible with the old version, your cold-boot times shouldn't be getting worse.

We believe it's already better from a perspective of functionality and stability, though, and not everything requires more clicks than before.
Like I said, updates over the last year or two in the browser extension are a much stronger example of this (like burying even "Edit" of all things in a menu), and I'm only starting to see the same early warning signs over here. For example, looking at a non-editing view of a saved login: the item's creation date, something I'm rarely specifically looking for but is often helpful context to see, is no longer shown by default, and the add to favorites button has also been moved under a 3-dot menu along with sharing history. None of those are exactly world-ending, but I certainly don't like the direction. I've got a ton of screen space and I'd like less of the pixels to be white.

Other than revealing a password or displaying in large type, what actions are you frequently trying to do that take longer now than before?
Honestly, the performance is the really big one. Everything else is less about doing any one specific task, and more like someone's moved all my furniture around by a few inches so I keep stubbing my toe on things I didn't expect to be there. I know right where everything should be, and suddenly it's not there.

Even if the new version may have some new functionality, I don't like things changing on me if I didn't purposely install an update. If and when I want to optimize my existing workflow any further, that should be my decision.

This whole thing was almost as big of a mental hurdle for me to get over when initially considering a SaaS password manager as was the concept of handing over total control of all my credentials to a third party and storing them on their servers instead of safely on my local machine. In general, I much prefer local software under my complete control, and strongly prefer to keep most updates strictly to security and stability.

Finally, this isn't something I expect any explicit support for, but I do a fair bit of customization of various sites and webapps with extensions like Stylus and ViolentMonkey. Any major changes are going to mean I have to redo all that work, and as has been the trend with a lot of the popular frontend frameworks lately, the new version has more opaque markup that makes it more difficult to find elements on the page, including random characters at the end of every class name that typically mean I can't trust them to stay stable (although thank you for at least not using Tailwind). I fortunately haven't been doing too much of that stuff with 1Password, mostly because I can't easily do the same inside the extension popup which is what really needs it, but the couple cosmetic tweaks I've gotten used to are still one more thing that makes the new UI feel even more foreign, and will also take up more of my time (just once, not repeatedly) if I decide to take a stab at re-implementing them.

we now have a keyboard shortcut for revealing passwords too: Ctrl-R.
That's hardly ever a thing I personally, do, but... we're talking about the web UI, right? Ctrl+R is a fairly universal shortcut in every browser I'm aware of for reloading the page. I'm not sure what browser you're using, but I know I don't let webpages override core browser controls, so Ctrl+R would do sort of the opposite of revealing a password. I certainly wouldn't want to rely on that override being possible, since it seems like the sort of behavior that could get patched out of any browser that currently allows it at any time.

However, most importantly:

The new version is, well, new, and just hasn't had all the wrinkles ironed out yet. There are a few specific areas we're planning to tune in the coming months.

We're still polishing up a few things, but we're getting close to replacing the old experience with the new one permanently.
"replacing the old experience with the new one permanently" sounds an awful lot like "disabling the old experience" to me, and given all the things that are still under active development, I really hope that's not the case. I can't believe I have to say this, but shipping a half-baked redesign is not a good thing. The older version works fine (I would even argue "much better" given the performance difference), so this isn't some emergency situation where a "good-enough" rewrite is needed ASAP. There's a difference between having a public beta period and outright developing in production, and while making the beta version the default is a bit of a gray area, turning off the stable version definitely crosses that line. And even if you don't like calling an unfinished codebase that runs consistently slower than its predecessor "beta," there's nothing wrong with keeping a "classic" version around until its replacement can manage to go at least a month or so without needing any big changes.

Sorry if this was mentioned before, I went back a few pages but didn't see anything.

This comment concerns the Document type, if the uploaded document is an image (png, jpg, etc., not a pdf or doc). In the old version, clicking on the document from the list would load it in the main window and display the image as a preview. In the new version, it just shows the icon of the image, the filename, and a link to download - no preview.

I understand 1P isn't meant to be a photo or file management software, but the types of images I'd store there don't need to be downloaded again and again when I want to view them, I just want to see it within 1P. For example, a financial service I use requires a form of 2FA that's a "one-time pad", in that it's a grid of letters with codes (think vertical A, horizontal G, = 3341 (yeah, don't ask why)). Every time I log into this financial service I need to check it.

This image was added in 1P. It would be bad to download it out of the secure environment and have to remember to delete it every time I use it - it's a critical document, but I just want to see the image so I can find my code. The browser extension, the Windows app, and the mobile app all require me to download it, but the old version of the web browser allowed me to just view it within the secure environment. It'd be ideal for this to be allowed to continue (and in general allow image previews in all the apps, but this isn't the topic for that I guess!).

Adding my impressions to the conversation. I like the efficiency of the new interface, and although I have only just started using it, I haven't experienced any issues so far.

Hello, Please note that there is a functionality that was working in the current UI and is not working in the new UI and this is the reason I'm not able to use new UI. I hope to use the new UI and ask my organization to use it as well, but this feature is preventing us from using it.

See attached screenshot where we have a guest user and have only share one vault with them titled "Shared" and they are able to use that in the old ui and view all the items in the "shared" vault, However, after switching to new UI, there is nothing that appears for the same user, see attached image where there is no vault visible. I expect parity in functionality with "Shared" vault in the new UI. Please help with this feature. I wrote to your support team, but they point me to things that are not related to new UI and that is why decided to post here.

kindly note that I'm using the same browser to take the screenshots and is a fork of chromium on linux.
Please help with this issue and kindly fix this before making the new UI as a standard, because a lot of folks on my team rely to communicate with B2C usecases only on this feature.

Thank you!
orgname=1984llc

After turning off all of the extensions,1Password allowed me to see the item details. What is strange is that I had added the 1Password extension AFTER I had this problem so maybe another extension?

1P_Rob

The attachments are screenshots of the "old" (before the redesign) web page on page 1, and a screenshot of the App version 7.9.836: The redesigned web UI looks too much like the app UI for my taste. I read that you are "aligning them". If that's the case, I suggest that you clearly mark that you are on the web page to avoid confusion.

For what it's worth, I prefer the "old" web pages to the App and I use the web interface almost exclusively. It looks cleaner and more modern than the App. I realize that you're almost done with the new web pages, since it's in beta and you're prompting us to "Update Early", so I don't expect you to reverse course at the last minute.

Thanks for listening.

If archiving would preserve the groupings of passwords (not sure of the current nomenclature - is it still called a “vault” or something else? - that I use to group passwords associated with one project), that would be good.

heykipp actually, it does do this. All items belong to a vault, and even after they're archived, they remain in the same vault. The problem you've almost certainly noticed is that in the desktop app, the only way to limit the Archive to particular vaults is with collections. In the web app, however, selecting a vault from the menu at the top will scope down the entire sidebar just like a collection, so you can see just the archived items for that vault.

This difference in pattern between the web and desktop apps isn't ideal, of course. It was born out of necessity for performance reasons on the web, but we need to do some research to figure out how we can best unify the experience across the board.

If you're going to align the UI of the my.1password.com with the App, please make it obvious when we're interacting with the Web Page.

jfarnsworth are you saying that because the web app looks like the desktop app, you're getting confused which one you are using? Web browsers typically have an interface around the web content, usually with a URL bar. Even minimalist browsers like Arc, which I've been using lately, has a thick border around the whole window. Does that not provide enough context?

What puzzles me is why a user, who is already logged in and viewing a record, must keep logging in every time they follow a new link. Duplicating the tab you are already viewing triggers login. The original view didn't do this to you.

Icannotturnoffqa Hmm, the original view has always done this as well. In fact, it was only a few months ago (February I think) that I made an improvement so that reloading the current page doesn't also sign you out. I'm hoping to get back to that project and extend it to work with multiple tabs, but my focus has been on getting this new experience to feature parity.

For context, 1Password is not like other web apps in many ways, but a really big one is that we don't rely simply on an authentication token to sign you in. Typically an authentication token like that is stored in a cookie in your browser, and if anyone had access to your device, they could access the token value and also the account it gives you access to.

With 1Password, though, we need more than an authentication token. We need you to have encryption keys to decrypt your data in the browser. If we were to just save those in a cookie in your browser, someone could steal them and all of your data just by having brief access to your device. So we're needing to get a bit more creative in how we allow a session to be persisted to minimize the risk to you.

Also, I wish we could configure the timeout period in our profiles.

Icannotturnoffqa you can do this on your profile page. Screenshot attached.

I like the design that you can read the complete text in the notes or whatever is written, the full text...i mean the previous design.

CarlosGil I'm not following what you're saying, I'm sorry. Could you post a screenshot of the notes that are cut off in the new version but not the old? As far as I'm aware, you can view all the text in both versions. There are some fields that get truncated for display, but the ones I've seen are truncated in the old version as well.

Now that the new version has become the default, it's become immediately clear that it is S L O W.

Hey, d9a. Thanks for your comments. I recognize that the new view is slower to load than the old one. In my testing, when switching between the new and the old, it takes about 2 seconds to load the old version and about 3 seconds to load the new version. We will continue optimizing, but there are a couple things working against us that might be useful context:

The new version is a separate app that doesn't load until you click into it. The old version is part of the same app as the sign-in screen, home page, profile page, etc., so navigating within that app is snappier, but switching between old and new gives a clearer picture of total load time.

The new version is, well, new, and just hasn't had all the wrinkles ironed out yet. There are a few specific areas we're planning to tune in the coming months. We believe it's already better from a perspective of functionality and stability, though, and not everything requires more clicks than before. For example, you can use arrow keys to navigate the item list, select multiple items, drag and drop them onto tags, archive, etc. in the sidebar, or use keyboard shortcuts to delete, archive, or restore items. None of that was supported before, and there's more we can do there.

In general, 1Password is different from many web apps because there's an awful lot that has to be done in your browser rather than on a server. We can't do much of anything until your data is decrypted, and that can only happen in the browser.

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.

d9a Other than revealing a password or displaying in large type, what actions are you frequently trying to do that take longer now than before?

Edit: I forgot to mention, we now have a keyboard shortcut for revealing passwords too: Ctrl-R.

Is it not supposed to display details when clicking on an item? Browser = Edge

Dfox my guess is that you have a browser extension interfering with the contents of the page. Try turning off all of your browser extensions. If it works, start turning them back on one by one to see when it breaks. Many browser extensions can be disabled on specific sites, and I would recommend turning as many off as possible on 1password.com, not just to keep them from breaking the page, but because that's where your most sensitive data is displayed, and you don't want a browser extension to be able to read that data, whether or not it's intentionally malicious.

I found MOVE function, but no option to COPY.

bsue apologies for the confusion. "Copy" is now called "Duplicate". It works the same as before, just a new name. You can duplicate an item in the existing vault or into a different vault.

I found MOVE function, but no option to COPY. We have two vaults, both using the some of the same sites but with different logins. After a copy, we rename one of the items to avoid confusion. The old version gave a choice of MOVE OR COPY. Definitely a need this option and it needs to be obvious, not hidden under a drop-down of the vault name.

1Password Version: Not Provided
Extension Version: 2.26.1
OS Version: Windows 11
Browser: Edge