Problems with new 1password.com
While the new 1password.com was in beta for a few months, I was never able to do much testing with it, because even setting aside the long period where it was available but read-only, then editable but still missing key features, the severe performance problems (2-3x slowdown in loading time) reported by numerous users early on were never fixed, making any further testing more painful than I care to undertake for a product I'm paying to use. Now that the old version has been suddenly removed (despite known remaining issues in the replacement) and I'm forced to use the new one, more problems are immediately apparent when trying to perform basic tasks. Here's a quick rundown of the trouble I ran into while creating my first new login item in the new UI:
Performance
The performance problems, of course, remain the primary frustration. This has already been litigated to death and it's been made clear that 1Password finds the slowdown acceptable, but I would be remiss for not pointing out what an absolute embarrassment it is to ignore such an enormous reduction in performance. People can have different opinions on UI changes, but 10+ second page load times are objectively bad, should never happen in a modern browser on modern hardware, and (in my experience) never did prior to this change, which has now made them the norm. As a web developer myself, my position remains that the exact frequency of these significantly slower page loads is not the issue, but rather the fact that they happen at all. The reduced performance alone should have halted any further development as far back as May, when editing items was finally enabled and users started reporting long load times, before further work was invested into such a poorly performing framework. Instead, performance has continued to worsen over time: the 4-second average load times I was seeing from the new UI back in July with a freshly filled cache are now up around 6 seconds, and cold booting the new UI (e.g. in private windows) has increased from 6-10 seconds to over 17 seconds today. It's really hard to take anything else about the UI seriously after having to wait that long for the page to load, and it sets the tone for the remainder of the experience, leaving me more sensitive to inconveniences I probably would have glazed over otherwise.
Creating new items
The very first UI nuisance I encountered actually builds on one that's been present in every version of 1Password I've used. Being a password manager, I use 1Password overwhelmingly to store passwords, so I've always found it mildly annoying that every single time I want to add a new one, I click a + icon of some sort and then have to make a separate selection to indicate that I'd like to save an item of type Login, the same selection I've made for over 99% of the items in my vaults. Off the top of my head, a segmented + New Login | v style button that defaults to creating a Login when clicked on the left side, with a dropdown button on the right that matches the current behavior to select another type feels like a solid way to improve this little UX quirk without making non-logins any more difficult to create, but that's a separate topic. For now, it's just one extra click, there's no long loading spinner before I can make that second selection, and at least Login is always right at the top, consistently just a few pixels below my mouse cursor.
However, the new 1password.com elevates this otherwise small nuisance to the point of ridiculousness. I'm still required to make this selection within the extension, but once the new tab to enter more details finally finishes loading, I'm asked a second time to select what type of item I'd like to save, this time in a 2-column layout for some reason:
This happens on multiple devices of mine with the latest version of the Chrome extension, and obviously also the newest web UI since I have no control over that. Setting aside the fact that I can confidently say I'd never use a lot of these options anyway, surely it can't be intentional to prompt users twice, right?
Adding fields
The other UX regressions I ran into are a little harder to compare since the old UI is no longer available, but I don't need a direct comparison to know the new behavior is worse. For example, while I don't remember exactly what the old UI did when I added a new section/field, I'm pretty sure I didn't have to make this type selection every time:
I think new fields used to just default to text, which is usually correct, and could be changed to another type if needed. I remember being annoyed at having to make this same extra selection in the mobile app for quite a while, and that annoyance being one of several reasons I'd always lean toward managing items on a real computer whenever possible.
Naming fields
After selecting a section type, there's yet another new step required, because each new field is now pre-filled with the literal word "text" (or whatever other type was selected, some of which might even make sense as-is), requiring me to manually select and replace that generic value with whatever I actually want:
Sections appear to be the only thing that doesn't get pre-filled with its own type on creation. I don't know what the old version would have done if a user had left a field name blank because I never tried when I had the chance, but I'm pretty sure these same values were still shown as temporary placeholder text. Simply using that as a default value if the field name was left blank on save would certainly be a reasonable way to go, and even if that's not how it worked in the past, doing so now would have the same end result as the current behavior without forcing users to manually delete the value if they want to use something else.
This problem even applies to naming the item itself, with the name being pre-filled with the value "Login" that must be manually deleted. This problem was reported in the main feedback thread at least as far back as June, and is one of the many problems that was reported but not fixed before taking away the less buggy version.
Security questions are also a weird addition here: At first look, I thought there was a fixed list of only 5 security questions I could pick from, which would make the feature pretty useless.
I did figure out that I'm still allowed to type custom values despite the dropdown's presence implying otherwise, but that wasn't very intuitive. It's even mentioned on screen in (very small, low-contrast) text, but the popup with suggested values is what grabs my attention, and that grayed-out text doesn't even register as something that I'd expect might contain important information. Since I'd almost always have to type a custom question anyway, this works out to basically just a shortcut to creating a new section with a pre-filled title and then defaulting new fields within the section to text. That saves a couple clicks in the new UI, especially since the "Section" option is so far down the list, but with the old UI where (as I recall) adding a section was a dedicated button that only took a single click and new items defaulted to text, this wouldn't have been necessary. Instead, it's in its own highly prominent section above all other field types that can be created, which feels like an odd prioritization.
1Password Version: Not Provided
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: Not Provided
Browser: Not Provided
Comments
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I'm sure there's more to find, but these were the most noticeable friction points I noticed just trying to create a single login item using the new UI. I'd been casually tracking the old feedback thread for months, and was quite surprised when the old version suddenly disappeared without warning despite new issues continuing to be reported. The "new experience coming soon" banner on 1password.com doesn't really count as any sort of notice, since it was there for almost an entire year, and for most of that time the ~new experience~ wasn't even close to feature parity with its predecessor, so I was expecting more time to test a fully functional version before it became the only option.
As a final note, I really do hate giving a bunch of negative feedback in response to what I know took a lot of work. In general, I much prefer to quietly focus on positive things, and hope that any problems I encounter will be reported by someone else rather than complaining every time I'm inconvenienced. But I rely on 1Password for some incredibly important tasks, and when I see threads where other users have already given the same feedback I came to give and were dismissed with "sorry but that's not what we've heard from the majority of users" it really bothers me. Lots of the users who disliked the spaced-out minimalist design probably switched to something else back during the big 1Password 8 push, so it's no surprise you're not continuing to hear as much feedback in that same vein anymore. I didn't jump into the fray back then to amplify all the criticisms I very much agreed with, but I'm not sure how anyone could be surprised by some pushback from the users like me who stuck around and simply took refuge with the last platform that wasn't using a "one size fits all" design in response to it being made "more consistent" with the very platforms we've been avoiding. So while I've been giving positive feedback for years in the form of annual credit card payments, comments like that are the reason I feel like I have to sit down and spell out the problem in more detail.
Unfortunately, I just had to drop that annual subscription down to a monthly one as I begin the slow and painful search of comparing alternatives. I realize the evergreen SaaS model is a lot easier for developers and more profitable for software companies, but that doesn't make me feel any better about all the control I lose over my experience in the process. The fact that I ever went with 1Password instead of an open source option was the result of a huge gap in UX at the time, and that gap no longer exists today. The worst part is that what I know I really want is "1Password from a few years ago," and I know none of the other options are going to get me there.
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