Looks are most often deceiving. Webflow looks really great in a lot of aspects. There are small areas with little details that could see improvement, and I’m sure the team is onto that stuff already. But there is one thing that has been creeping around and not only destroying the minds of my clients, but me.
I’m the one who takes all the heat when the UX of Webflow is terrible. And there is a lot my customers and I do not like about the Collections interface. For the first few minutes all looks great, but with each minute of use, it quickly becomes the biggest burden of Webflow.
Webflow is branded as easy to use for everyone, whether they can code or not. But lack of convenience destroys any claims of “easy to use” when something gets this annoying. Webflow claims it’s so “easy” to add all your products. And it “IS”, but it’s really not.
You can import all your products with a CSV file, but the documentation on that is garbage. Good luck figuring out how to style for your headers in rich text elements, or adding multiple items for a Multi-Reference item for a product/blog post/anything.
You won’t be creating separate elements for a Rich Text item because you have to figure out what Webflow even means by putting text in double quotes. Does that mean it can only be a text/paragraph item? No header? Where is the information about adding multiple things to one collection item?
Importing via CSV is useful, although poorly documented. And assuming that were perfect… which I’m sure Webflow is further developing for, so the importing part of it isn’t ultimately what bothers me… creating multiple products is ultra tedious and slow, and deleting them is even WORSE. I had to delete 170 items once… somehow THAT didn’t set me off that very moment.
Working with collection items is a terrible experience. You have to scroll all the way down to Archive, Delete, or Duplicate an item, and you have to drag your cursor ALL over the screen just for saving/creating items, just to select a different collection, view your assets, or back out of the collections overlay, go to your dashboard, etc. Rarely I enjoy that I can’t delete an entire collection with items, but I find myself dreading that I can’t. Plans often change, especially with Webflow.
Don’t take all of this as me being ultra serious. Some of it is outright nitpicking. But no one wants to use the collections view because it’s a miserable experience. I’m not being harsh, I’m being straight forward and honest. It needs to be improved, even at the cost of aesthetics. It looks nice, but the experience makes me want to do something else. And so I’m speaking out about it.
I know Webflow is supposed to be for everyone. I get it. You don’t have to tell me anything relevant to that. But it gets to a point where something needs attention really badly. And that is the Collections Manager. Please, at the VERY least, make it easier to delete, duplicate, and archive multiple items at the same time AND allow items to be exported to a CSV file.
I am under the impression that improved CSV support is incoming, as I can see on the Wishlist, although considering you can import content via CSV right now, it’s possible that it is here and the Wish is “complete”.
Please make all our lives easier. Everyone hates the Collection Manager UX.
I think something that would tremendously help Webflow would be to give actual updates (mainly videos, blog posts, Twitter updates [And NO, telling us that something is upcoming is not giving an actual update. How about documenting what different layouts were planned, or showing a conversation discussing an issue or solution etc of something]) of how projects are going. I mean, why wouldn’t a company do that? It would be easy attention-grabbing content and vastly increase the audience. Why wouldn’t anyone want a bigger Webflow community? Webflow is just so distant from us.
The purpose of this post is to get more eyes on this issue. Most people browse this forum. The Wishlist just seems dead as long as we are all waiting for the most popular ideas to be completed.
update
I guess a couple hours after I posted this, CSV support officially arrived. Except, nothing has changed. It seems more as though Webflow was waiting for a bug update before announcing it or something.
BUT since it’s official I can truly complain about it.
When importing CSV files, for whatever reason, duplicate items are not overwritten. This is a huge nightmare to deal with, especially when items have to be deleted individually. And as I mentioned before, there is insufficient documentation on the Rich Text item.