Categories in dropdown

andx1pw

Categories in dropdown seems to me a bad idea. It renders categories useless. Arguably they always have been because they are too static, and this is only a first step getting rid of them?

Or have I misunderstood something and collections are the new categories?

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1Password Version: 8.5.0
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: Win11

PeterG_1P

Hi @andx1pw, we appreciate this feedback. The role of categories - how it should work, where it should be - is one that generates plenty of discussion here on the forums!

While some of this has been discussed before, I can tell you that Categories moved to a drop-down menu partly to make more economical use of the left-side sidebar, and to create greater consistency in the types of elements a user can expect to find there.

As @roustem noted:

The sidebar in 1Password 7 has problems. It is overloaded, it does too much. There are two different states that present different information (vaults vs categories) and this is confusing, especially to new users. Even I got lost a quite a few times trying to use the sidebar.

Collections are meant to have a different function than categories. Categories relates to what kind of item an item is - for example, sometimes its handy to summon all the Bank Account items at once.

Collections is more about creating groups of vaults that you can use for a given purpose (or excluding vaults you that you want to ensure don't get involved). For example, someone might have a couple of work-related accounts that have a lot of power, and they want to ensure that they're not interacting with those when they're doing more mundane tasks. You could create a group of vaults (a Collection) that exclude those sensitive things, and that way you know you are only working with the items you want to be on a day-to-day basis.

I hope this is informative - let me know what you think! We're always open to improvements, and these recent changes are part of that; an effort to make the whole 1Password experience easier, more useful, and more elegant. We'll look forward to your perspective. 👍

andx1pw

Hi @PeterG_1P , thank you very much for taling the time to explain this in such detail.

WilfT

Quite honestly the Tags can be used in a similar way to Categories which groups items up in the way the user wants them so to have both in sidebar seems to me to be a bit of a duplicate to me. I prefer the tags now and probably won't use categories.
Some of my passwords are from way back so probably didn't even use the correct category when it first came out.

PeterG_1P

Sure thing, @andx1pw. My pleasure!

And thanks for these insights, @WilfT. We're keeping track of feedback to understand user scenarios and how new features are proving useful (or could be improved). We appreciate your perspective. 😃

chris55

@PeterG_1P
I personally am not a fan of the drop down categories away from the sidebar.

A little suggestion to throw in, could categories not be put back in the sidebar, then categories and vaults have a show/hide animation when interactacting/ interacting with them?

So you hover over “vaults”, it auto unhides your vaults, you select which one you want, when you move the cursor away it hides the list but displays the current selected vault.

Same idea for categories.

It’s a similar idea to macOS and windows, when you can hide the taskbar until you interact with it. This would stop the clogging up of the sidebar, but have things nearly in a logical place next to each other.

I don’t know how the would work for the mobile apps though 😂

snozdop

Collections is more about creating groups of vaults that you can use for a given purpose (or excluding vaults you that you want to ensure don't get involved).

I've not looked at Collections before. Do people really have so many vaults that they need to group them into collections?

I've been using 1Password since at least 2008, and I've only recently split off my home business related items from my personal items into separate vaults (not even sure why - it worked fine with everything in one vault), and then I've got a shared vault with my other family members. Certainly not enough vaults to make collections out of!

Am I using 1Password incorrectly? Or are collections aimed at large business with thousands of users spread across different locations and departments? I could see that might need some management, but categories and tags suit my organisational needs.

Maybe that's why so many individual (not business) users would like to have Categories back in the sidebar. Unless you've got dozens of vaults and collections, the sidebar **doesn't ** get overloaded as @roustem claimed. And Collections adds yet another level of clutter/organisation.

roustem

@snozdop You are absolutely right. It certainly depends on how many people you need to share with. We can see that over time the number of vaults that people are using is going to get bigger, just like any other information we have to deal with.

In my Family account we have vaults for Home, Auto, Shopping, Software, and Financial. There are also shared vaults for each kid and grandparent. I moved some of my Personal items into a Confidential vault to use the Travel Mode.

We have over 2,000 vaults in the AgileBits business account. Thankfully, I have direct access to only about 50 of them. I also have 2 more accounts that are used to share data between different companies. It ens up being almost 100 vaults that would be shown in the sidebar — I could use some extra space!

At the same time, we do want to make 1Password working well for everyone and scale up and down, from a single user all the way up to hundreds of thousands. The team has some ideas and we hope to find time to get them tested and implemented.

snozdop

@roustem Thanks. Yeah I can definitely see how being able to group vaults (by department, who needs access, purpose etc.) would be essential for managers at larger businesses. I'm not sure how many individual or family accounts would benefit though? Perhaps these greater levels of organisation could be on by default for team & business accounts, but off for personal & family? It adds extra complexity for people who might not need it and could be off-putting for new users. Then as new users get familiar with the product, and their number of vaults, and shared users grows, it could suggest turning Collections on for greater organisation.

I'm just thinking out loud really, of course, in practise it could make it more complex - who knows?

dteare

Thanks for the feedback everyone. 🤗

We've been doing some experimentation on enabling categories to be added to the sidebar. Be sure to check out the exploring sidebar categories thread for details and add your thoughts and 👍🏻 if it's what you were hoping for.

Take care,

++dave;
1Password Founder

PeterG_1P

Hello @snozdop @chris55 @andx1pw @WilfT !

Guess what: in the newest Betas, you can now place Categories in the sidebar (if you prefer that layout).

If you're interested to give it a try, we'll be very happy to hear what you think! Thanks again for the great feedback and discussion so far.

WilfT

Although i used to look at the categories in the side bar I've now got into the habit of tags which seems to be more user friendly as you are really making your own categories with tabs.
Catogories are useful for new login ins etc to get the correct format for the login but after that i will use tags to group them as I wish

PeterG_1P

Thanks @WilfT - and we certainly respect that. Thanks for letting us know what kind of approach you find useful!