First, thank you for listening to the feedback over the past couple of weeks regarding the new update and working to make changes in response to that feedback.
So far, one thing that I haven't seen mentioned as a planned improvement is regarding the overall use of icons, color, and space in the updated UI. Yesterday, I had a staff member/user call me and literally say "Ironclad sucks now" and it was mainly because of how unintuitive the interface has become. And this was the third call I've gotten from people unhappy with the update. This is beyond just taking multiple clicks to do simple things. For example:
- The interface is so monochromatic now that it feels meaningfully less intuitive. I have been surprised at just how much worse the feel of the interface is after all the key action buttons and sometimes even key icons like checkmarks under user images became black. Colors help create focus and attention. The green action buttons in the previous interface communicated "Hey you can do this here!" Now the buttons almost fade into the background. There's no focus, everything just runs together like mud.
- The search box is now a tiny little button you have to click to turn it into a tiny search box that you can barely type 3 words into. This is not only poor from a usability standpoint, but poor visual communication considering how powerful repository search actually is in Ironclad.
- The lack of intuitiveness continues with the lack of labels on buttons and unintuitive icons for buttons. You have a "full screen" icon that really is supposed to take you to a totally different page and the fact that it has no label it makes it even worse. It leaves it to the user figure out what these obscure buttons do.
- Massive drop shadows (which I understand are probably meant to add some kind of focus on the main content in a page) take up so much space that it actually feels like a waste of space. Furthermore, especially in the workflow view, they're putting a focus on things aren't even the focus. Shouldn't the focus be on the documents themselves?
There are clear ways to make this better: add color back to the interface, improve the layouts to be more intuitive, add labels to buttons when it makes sense to do so, figure out what was working well about the previous interface (colors, layout, buttons, etc.) and find other ways to make the interface more intuitive, especially for people who use it only to review things, which is the majority of users in our case.
Thank you so much for your attention and continued work on hopefully making Ironclad better.
