Feedback on 1Password v8

Jumped at the chance to join the early release for 1Password v8. It's not been as smooth as I hoped it would be. Reading some of the feedback here makes me understand that others might be feeling the same way. Want to share some specific thoughts:

1) The overall look of the app isn't right. There's too much space and padding between all the items. This means more scrolling to get to items that fall "below the fold". Might be nice to tighten some of the spacing up so we can see more items at one glance.

2) Searching in the new app is strange - why doesn't the list filter when I search?? That was an AMAZING feature of v7 and earlier. For example, I have two VA529 accounts for my daughters. I could type "529" into the search bar and BOTH accounts would show up and I could just click on one of them to grab my 2FA to sign in. Easy peasy! In v8, when I type "529" the list doesn't filter and nothing shows up in the autofill drop-down area. When I first did this, I thought that the entries had been deleted!!! If I hit "CMD-enter" to search (WHY do I have to do a key press to search when I'm in the search bar??), I get zero results. It's only when I type out "Virginia529" that the two accounts show up. v7 would search "within" words but it appears that v8 is doing "exact match!!" That's painful. I have to remember exactly how my entry is entered in order to find it!‽ Is it EZPassMA, E-Z Pass MA, or EZ Pass MA??? The search feature is very much still in beta and needs a lot of work! (Oddly enough, 1Password for Safari search bar works correctly and can find the accounts...that lets me know the working code is in there somewhere!)

3) 1Password for Safari/1Password Mini is not great either. If I'm not logged in when I click the 1Password icon on my Safari window, 1Password for Safari pops up but then I have to CLICK AGAIN to log in to 1Password. This opens up the full app which then unlocks the Safari Extension. That's an extra mouse move and click when I used to be able to click once and then type in my password. Seems like this workflow could be streamlined.

I really appreciate everything you guys are doing with updating the app and trying to keep it looking fresh. There are some useful features from the previous version that were extremely helpful and I miss them.

Won't be canceling my subscription...may downgrade to v7 but will likely just lazily stick with v8 and hope that some of these changes get made. This is early access after all!

Thanks for listening!

Jacob


1Password Version: 8.4.0
Extension Version: 2.1.3
OS Version: 11.6

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Comments

  • Hi @jwessler ,

    Thank you for taking the time to write in with your feedback. We've raised a few internal development issues to tackle these problems, and hope to get them solved as soon as possible.

    Cheers,
    Kevin

  • dtoub
    dtoub
    Community Member

    +1 for having to authorize twice (even if 1PW is unlocked, I have to unlock the browser extension, which is a regression).

  • ag_ana
    ag_ana
    1Password Alumni

    Thank you for chiming in on this too @dtoub, noted :+1:

  • jwessler
    jwessler
    Community Member

    @ag_kevin and @ag_ana - any update on the search feature? It's still very much not useful. I have to search by the exact string instead of having search find characters inside of other strings.

    Is this a feature you are going to be bringing back or am I just out of luck on getting back to the other search functions?

    Thanks so much for your answer!

  • rob
    rob
    edited April 2022

    Hey, @jwessler. Search is one of those things that's been hard to get just right. There are ongoing conversations about how to make it better internally, but from what I understand so far, it's not quite as simple as just matching any part of a string.

    We're experimenting with some different approaches and I hope we'll end up with something great, even if it doesn't make it into the first official release of 1Password 8 for Mac.

    ref: dev/core/core#9056

  • dtoub
    dtoub
    Community Member

    Understood but the desired behavior is how it worked in 1PW 7, so there’s that

  • viswiz
    viswiz
    Community Member

    @rob I'm using search in v7 all the time and it just works. Of course this is just my limited point of view.
    It's not only the missing sub string search in v8. It's the whole search experience in v8 that's just awful. In v7 I start typing and the list is immediately filtered/searched. In v8 I get results that rarely match my expectations and even worse it's not even showing all results but a fraction of it sorted by relevance - whatever relevance may be in this context. On top of that the results are not presented within the list of elements but in a separate window and I have to press CMD+Enter to all results.

  • jwessler
    jwessler
    Community Member

    @rob - Thanks for your reply. I totally understand that certain features are difficult to code. However, search was working in v7 - flawlessly.

    If I typed in "529," I would get ALL results with 529 anywhere in the string of any field.

    Now, with v8, I have to type the entire string to get a result. So, a search for "529" will return zero results because nothing in my vault starts with 529. I have to search "Virginia529" to get to my 2FA for the 529 entries.

    It worked in all versions prior to v8...that's what's so baffling. Clearly, it's not as simple as "copy the old code into the new program." (CURSE YOU STACK OVERFLOW FOR "TRAINING" ME TO COPY PASTE!)

    It really is a step back from v7. A HUGE step back...especially for those of us who use 1Password A LOT because it's awesome and we love the protection it affords us. But, having to remember what exact text string I used to title something can be challenging.

    Search works great in the iOS mobile app as well. It's just the Mac Desktop app that is woefully behind.

    I think that's what we're all trying to get across here.

    Thanks.

  • Hey, folks. Thanks for the comments. I get it, I promise, and I'm frustrated with the current status too.

    I just read through some of the internal discussion again, and the main thing that is complicating the effort right now is handling Unicode. We're trying to make sure that search works for all users, not just English-speaking users. Unfortunately, addressing the complexities of searching with Unicode characters has had the effect of making plain old ASCII search worse.

    I'm confident we can overcome the challenges, but it's going to take time and effort. And while it feels like a step backwards, I do like that we're starting with a foundation that supports other languages well and building and optimizing from there, rather than treating other languages as second class.

    I hope that helps.

  • volts
    volts
    Community Member
    edited April 2022

    Pretend I'm saying this in a l33t hip gangsta way:

    Can we get some trigram tokens up in `dis joint?

  • mia
    mia
    Community Member

    @jwessler the new beta has a setting to tighten the density of the interface and it's PERFECT.

    I also completely agree with you about being able to find search strings. I just tried to search for the second half of one of my usernames in a forum and it didn't find it. That is.. strange and unexpected.

  • Pretend I'm saying this in a l33t hip gangsta way

    I appreciate the comedic relief, @volts. 😄

    trigram tokens

    As a person not responsible for our search implementation, I don't feel too embarrassed to say I had to Google that. 😅 That said, now that I know what a trigram is, I'm still not confident in the interpretation of your suggestion. Would this be applied as something like a search index on all three-character substrings?

  • volts
    volts
    Community Member

    Yes, exactly.

    I'm making a wild number of assumptions about how 1Password search works, spewing some potentially-related concepts, and suggesting that fixing search should be easy, all at once! :-) :-D

    My assumption is that when Unicode support was added, the search algorithm was changed from a naive brute-force like %string% operation to a tokenized full-text system. I'm making that assumption because it's an obvious approach with a bunch of benefits, and it would explain the current behavior.

    The downside of word-boundary tokens is that they don't work for arbitrary partial search.

    My (semi-flippant) suggestion to add n-gram tokens is based on that assumption. That's one way to enable partial-string matches when using a full-text search system.

    And as a customer, I'm always right. I can confidently state that this should be 1) easy and 2) top priority.

  • viswiz
    viswiz
    Community Member

    Sometimes priorities seem to be a bit strange. We had search functionality with a streamlined interface that found everything I was looking for - including German Umlauts. Now I know that it had unicode problems. Ok, the problem had to be solved. But at least within my development team we follow one very basic principle: don't make it worse;-).
    AgileBits seems to follow a different path. Now we can search in unicode but only whole words and with a cumbersome interface. It's basically fixing one issue and breaking it for people who were not affected until then.
    On the other hand all non US users are still get US date format and shortcut assignment still thinks that all people use US keyboard layouts at least on macOS. Reported many times and still not fixed.

  • Thank you for the feedback, @viswiz. We will bear this in mind. Triaging and prioritizing issues is always a complex thing, as we're balancing lots of different customer needs and use cases - but hearing from folks in the forum (thank you!) gives us valuable insight on where the pain points are and what folks find most valuable about a given implementation.

  • xperseguers
    xperseguers
    Community Member

    Jumping in since most of this discussion is about partial search, which I totally agree with. What @volts wrote on April 11 sounds the way to go and I can only support this.

    Now, another important point from @jwessler in the very first post is about instant filtering of the list. That bothers me a lot since I now have to Cmd+ENTER to see the list of results without really knowing if what I entered made sense. Previously I just could see the instant filtering in action and that was light-year ahead in term of UX.

    I do like new features but was totally happy with 1P7, I really feel like the new features are not worth it when I think about the search UX in v8.

  • We appreciate your input, @xperseguers, and we're listening. Thanks for letting us know how that experience has been for you, and how you feel we could improve the search aspects especially. We'll do our best to exceed your expectations!

  • xperseguers
    xperseguers
    Community Member

    @PeterG_1P Everything is said concerning search in macOS beta version. However there’s a long lasting problem in iOS version (official, no beta) please see this short exchange of tweets, that explains the problem:

  • OAW
    OAW
    Community Member

    Odd. I'm running the latest beta and partial searches work as expected for me. And while the ** CMD+Enter** to see all results doesn't bother me I agree it would be better if the list was simply filtered in real time.

  • Thank you for the feedback, @OAW!

    @xperseguers - I haven't personally encountered this issue, but I'd be happy to connect you with our specialist iOS team, if you haven't been in contact already.

    I should note as well that the current iOS app (1Password 7 for iOS) is a different generation app, and essentially completely different from a code perspective, than 1Password 8. But in any case, we certainly want to make your workflow on this device as fluid as possible, so do let me know if you'd like us to dig into this issue over email. We're here for you! 😃

  • xperseguers
    xperseguers
    Community Member

    I answered the team on Twitter yesterday but forgot it here. Actually while trying to record a short video to demo the problem, I couldn’t reproduce anymore in two of my apps.

    The problem still appeared 2-3 days ago but in the mean time a new v8 beta has been released and installed.

    Since I have both v7 and v8 beta on my iPhone I really don’t know which is invoked when filling passwords in a native app, so I may only suppose this is the v8 beta and bug got fixed with last release. Cool!

    The instant filtering while typing in macOS version would still be a huge gain UX-wise if it could come back.

  • xperseguers
    xperseguers
    Community Member

    Edit: just could reproduce the search/filtering bug in a native app. It turned out it must have used v7 because a new beta of v8 had been installed automatically and my account there was locked… After unlocking v8, search/filtering in native app worked again.

    So it’s a long-lasting v7 bug which is finally fixed with v8 beta!

  • Hey @xperseguers, that's great! We always appreciate a good bug-fix. 🙌 Thanks for letting us know, and glad to hear that this has been an improvement to that aspect of your experience.

    It's still early in the testing period of 1Password 8 for iOS, but I'm personally pretty excited about it. The feedback has been great so far, too.

  • I've been away for a bit, but had to jump back in and say your reply once again put a smile on my face, @volts, thank you. 😄 I appreciate your ability to provide such clear direction and scope assessment.

    In seriousness, we have looked into this some more recently, and we'll get there.

  • fuchsr
    fuchsr
    Community Member

    +1 for enabling substring searches. I'm super happy with v8 but not being able to search for substrings is just bad.

  • Vote counted, @fuchsr. Ding! (that's the vote-counting bell, for anyone who wants to know).

    ref: IDEA-I-527

  • fuchsr
    fuchsr
    Community Member

    I just accidentally discovered this thread: https://1password.community/discussion/129931/this-one-flaw-makes-me-want-to-set-1password-8-on-fire-search-results-more-work-for-me-and-you, in which ⌥⌘F is mentioned. I tried it, and in fact it does EXACTLY the substring search we're asking for! So there's clearly no technical reason for not doing this from the search bar on top.

  • @fuchsr

    The team hopes to bring some love to the search. Hang in there with us. For someone who searches from the odd bits of his memory, I'll be one to advocate for this. You're not alone. 😊

  • feat_ford
    feat_ford
    Community Member

    Thanks @fuchsr! I laughed out loud when I saw the edit menu has "search" and "find" right next to each other. I would never have thought that "search" and "find" were different things; I've always seen them/thought of them as 100% synonymous.

    In any case since "find" seems to do exactly what I want it to do (it searches just the way 1Password 7 did -- auto filtering the list, and letting me search on partial strings in any field), I just re-mapped the keyboard shortcuts so Command-F brings me to "find" instead of "search". Hopefully this thread gets updated when "search" is upgraded to "find"'s functionality and I'll remap back :)

  • fuchsr
    fuchsr
    Community Member
    edited May 2022

    It made my day to see I made your day ! 😀

This discussion has been closed.