New Desktop UI Full Release Q&A

While the looks are nice, we are also not happy with the functionality in the new UI.

1. To see both metadata and document preview was essential.

2. Also to have all 4 squares of information at one glance made it easy to drag and drop documents which are assign to the user to overwrite a shortly accessed document. Unfortunately this is not possible any longer.

We find it hard to understand, that an update results in the decrease of functionality. Please, dear people at M-Files at least implement a view, where all the existing users feel at home again and regain access to the previous functions.

Many thanks for taking this in consideration.

Best regards

Alex

While the looks are nice, we are also not happy with the functionality in the new UI.

1. To see both metadata and document preview was essential.

2. Also to have all 4 squares of information at one glance made it easy to drag and drop documents which are assign to the user to overwrite a shortly accessed document. Unfortunately this is not possible any longer.

We find it hard to understand, that an update results in the decrease of functionality. Please, dear people at M-Files at least implement a view, where all the existing users feel at home again and regain access to the previous functions.

Many thanks for taking this in consideration.

Best regards

Alex

I absolutely agree that item 2 is a rather large problem. It's more clicks now to get to the required info and harder to get the full picture.  Although I can select my start page, it is not predictable what I need next time. Whether assigned items, latest docs or views, it's always something different that is relevant.
For pinned items I am afraid that it became too complex to use for a normal user since Drag&Drop doesn't work anymore. Right-Click menus (to add an item to pinned items) are suitable for expert users.

For item 1 there are alternatives (mentioned earlier in this thread). But yes, usability would increase quite a bit if this issue is properly addressed.

Other than the issues above (they are serious!), I am quite happy with the new client. Looks modern and 99% of the functionality has been kept.

Thank you for taking the time to describe the problems with good examples, that is truly appreciated.

Regarding issue #1, we are investigating a couple of alternatives. Would you prefer this to work the same way as what we have in the New Web client (three panes side by side: listing, metadata, preview)? Does this leave enough space for the listing in the horizontal direction?

Regarding issue 2, we are bringing some improvements in the upcoming months to improve the usability of the tabs. For one, we are investigating how we could show an 'unseen' item indication under the Assigned and Checked Out tabs, to give the user a better idea if there are new assignments waiting for him/her. I understand that this doesn't solve the drag&drop issue, though.

We are also developing an improvement to the pinning functionality, so that users can pin documents by dragging & dropping the item on top of the Pinned tab. Hopefully this makes it a bit easier for the users to understand how they can pin an item.

Thanks Samuli for feedback. I am happy to hear that M-Files takes those comments serious. 

On your question for #1: yes I think this is well solved in the new web page. Reason: An A4 page is usually in portrait format and therefore it doesn't need much space in the width but more in the height.

On #2: I don't think your proposal would address the raised issues. It's not about having an indication about unseen assigned items. If important we solve this differently (with e-mail notifications).  It's about less clicks and having an overview on the most important entry points to get a task done. As described above, the entry point will change frequently. Sometimes it's a view, sometimes an assigned item, sometimes a document I edited yesterday.

The pinned item issue seems easy to solve. Just allow drag&drop from a list to the header of the pinned item tab. Once the item is dropped, open the pinned item tab.

Looking forward to fast improvements of the new client. Not much needs to be done and it's (close) to perfect :-)

I think that the 3 wide web interface is a must, I honestly thought that was going to be included in this update(the whole "Web and Desktop Parity" part) and am extremely disappointed it wasn't since I know a lot of the complaints coming from my customers are about viewing both at the same time and not having to have to pop out the window.

I think the drag and drop for pinned would be great. There's got to be another solution for the quadrant problem, I honestly believe that there is a ton of wasted/white space in that area now thanks to the new interface. What used to show 4 categories now shows 1 and honestly, the ,checked out to me and very often the assigned to me do not need about half a screen(3 wide would solve a lot of this). I like to make sure my view permissions are very strict so only people who need to see a view see it so I also think there is a lot of wasted space here and typically people only care about the top 10 to 20 recently accessed. 

M-Files came up with the great idea of quadrants and I am not saying that's the best solution but what is in place now isn't better. Maybe a visual update or a better way to organize these quadrants would of be better. Something like if they selected something in one of the quadrants, that quadrant expanded to take the vertical space of itself and the quadrant below it pushing the other 3 parts of the quadrants to the left or right. 

This could even be done in a way where you can have your landing page functionality still making it the dominant quadrant but then the other 3 are sort of... minimalized. A picture to demo:

Above is just an idea, this would give the active quadrant more priority but still show relevant information that the other quadrants show.

The April '23 Update is now available and includes both metadata card and preview side by side and drag and drop to the Pinned tab: April's Product Monthly Update