Less features more quality

[Mowgli]

There appears to be an ongoing problem with software development. The race for more features leaves some very poor experiences in its wake.

As an example, since day one, editing dropdowns in Webflow has been a truly abysmal user experience. You have to keep switching through panels to keep opening the bloody thing every time you change something as it automatically decides to collapse itself for absolutely no good reason. Needless to say that this might be just an annoyance when you’re editing a simple dropdown, but often there are dropdowns with 10’s of elements. Editing these should take seconds but it takes a frustratingly long amount of time. This is just one example out of many.

It would be great if there was at least some energy focused in fixing these things. The amount of little annoying bugs is growing but there appears to be no effort devoted to resolving them.

[uzzer]

I have tried to address this issue before in very broad terms:

A different perspective on community feedback

Usually feedback platforms such as this forum are used to collect suggestions what (new features) should be added to the product. This is just the way things should be for a “young” product. But as Webflow matures, with all the terrific functionalities, complexity increases, as well. The greater the complexity, the greater the risk of clutter appearing here or there. Clutter could be either bloatware functionalities or unsophisitcated implementation of needed functionalities. I’d assume that …

Mind you, it’s going to become worse if a plug-ins marketplace is implemented (forum.webflow.com/t/pricing-marketplace-feedback/32366).

And as far as particular issues are concerned:

Lightbox "Settings (D)" panel needs streamlining

A Lightbox consists of two images - an image for the thumbnail view and an image for the full-screen view. This is not easily visible in the “Settings (D)” panel, though. Actually it’s quite a mess - on the one hand you see “Lightbox settings”, but on the other you also have “Replace image” and “Tab settings”. The latter does not make much sense as a title in this case It’d be much simpler to have an “Upload thumbnail image” title and an “Upload full-screen image” title.

Should we let go of the columns widget?

Would it be wiser to promote creation of columns by floats instead of the columns widget? I am not completely convinced in this, but I have a number of points to support it: the columns widget does not support all possible numbers of columns; as a consequence of the above novices would need to realize that they could achieve the same by floats, which is a waste of time - if one knew that columns were possible with floats, from the very beginning, s/he wouldn’t have wasted time learning how to…

"hoist" feature for Navigator

It would be very convenient to have a “hoist” feature for the Navigator panel, especially when you need to create lot of Div-s deep in a hierarchy. You can learn what “hoist” is here: http://myinfo.uservoice.com/forums/12499-general/suggestions/120667-hoist

[RickK (Rick Koston)]

I agree 100% with this post. There has been a lot of things we’ve been waiting for - custom break points for example - that have been requested for almost 2 years now and we have yet to see them. At some point the UI and some of these features need to be addressed. I find myself going more and more to Squarespace just because I don’t want to deal with Webflows interface even though I have less options.

[dapitts08 (davida)]

I agree. Plus it will make it easier for us to suggest webflow to fellow designers / developers. Right now anytime I recommend webflow I have to do so with disclaimers…specifically the lack of custom breakpoints. The fact that we can’t design specifically for landscape tablet view really needs to be addressed. I have said so repeatedly on the boards and will continue until the cows come home.

[thesergie (Sergie Magdalin)]

We 100% agree! This is actually why you haven’t seen a high number of features being pumped out by the Webflow team this year. We’ve been focusing on the rebuilding the core parts of the Designer so that improving old features and building new ones takes 1/10th the time.

As for redesigning old features—we’re taking this in steps. There are some features that are just a pain in the butt to use over and over (dropdowns are a great example, styling rich text elements is another). The design team at Webflow runs into these very often when designing sites, we document them, and we discuss ways to improve the experience. Most of the time the UI improvements we come up with are drastic changes, which would take a long time to develop. We’re working hard to finish up our core infrastructure development to be able to focus on the feature improvements you all mentioned.

I would say most of the UX problems you find in Webflow are my fault. As the sole designer from late 2012 to mid 2015, I had to design features so fast to keep up with demand. Now that we have a team of two more super talented product designers, we are able to dedicate much more though to existing workflows and new features. There are a lot of things in Webflow that bug me every time i start a new project (i can easily list a thousand), but overall I’m REALLY excited for the future of Webflow. The novel ways that the design team has been reimagining the style system, layout system, media queries, asset management, and so many more parts of Webflow is really inspiring. I can’t wait until you guys have them in your hands. Thanks for being patient with us and putting up with all the quirks.

[alexanderwong]

That’s awesome to hear @thesergie! Rarely I see any product teams take up responsibility like that. Nonetheless I think you and the whole Webflow team did a great job, hopefully these improvements shall come soon enough. Especially the long requested breakpoints and pseudo-class support.

Cheers!