February 13, 2025 / 🐎 Dependencies on a Timeline, Sidebar changes, Searching text on a Whiteboard, Performance fixes

[njyo]

Makes sense. Thanks for clarifying! Looking forward to this to launch then.

[Nevil_Hulspas]

Feel like my previous feedback was basically discarded and you went through with these changes anyway (mostly regarding My items). I feel like it’s a step back, super confusing in an already challenging UI for an average user. We’re not a small account by any means and this feels a bit like a “whatever” from your end. Not happy about this. Really bad UI implementation.

I think Notion does a great job of making this simple and understandable for all users (both admin and normal user):

You basically have 3 sections in Notion: Favorites, Teamspaces, and private.

In your implementation you have Favorites and private nested under one other tab called “my items”. And in your implementation you have threads and spaces under “all items”. Which basically means Notion has 3 sections, and Fibery has 4. But why divide this under 2 tabs? What is the added benefit? It’s more clicks, less clarity. Just keep it simple…

[mdubakov]

@Nevil_Hulspas

Feel like my previous feedback was basically discarded and you went through with these changes anyway (mostly regarding My items). I feel like it’s a step back, super confusing in an already challenging UI for an average user. We’re not a small account by any means and this feels a bit like a “whatever” from your end. Not happy about this. Really bad UI implementation.

We do listen to all users and I personally read all feedback regarding sidebar changes. We make decisions based in cumulative feedback, and if these changes will generate a lot of negative feedback, we will do things differently. So far it is very hard to say, since we have 2-3 pieces of negative feedback and 0 positive. Too early to make any conclusions. Anyway, it is quite easy to remove My Items and bring Favorites and Private back. We’ll accumulate more feedback and see.

[mdubakov]

@Nevil_Hulspas

And in your implementation you have threads and spaces under “all items”. Which basically means Notion has 3 sections, and Fibery has 4. But why divide this under 2 tabs?

This screenshot is quite simplistic. We have customers with 120 Spaces, and in Favorites some people have 20+ items. Navigation is a hard problem to solve, since setup can be very different. Let’s see what we will have as the final solution.

I explained the logic in the video above.

[Nevil_Hulspas]

The problem is that you knew this would create frustration and went ahead anyway

@mdubakov

and this release also includes several changes that will definitely piss some people off:

And you didn’t give any explanation or justification why this new setup is better. Like, none. Why did you implement it like this then, if you can’t even can share why it would be an improvement? Please enlighten us.

(I realize I sound very passionate about a stupid sidebar, so to speak. But our 17 person team and myself uses this so much every day, that’s actually quite an annoying impact. In the bigger scheme things it’s not a big deal, but it is in your day to day work if you use it like 12 hours a day)

[mdubakov]

@Nevil_Hulspas

Please enlighten us.

Maybe we did not do great job here, I will try to write down a list of problems we want to solve. We have MANY complaints about left sidebar configuration. Here is the brief list
to solve

• Admin wants to set structure of for all users
• Too many spaces → admins need some structure on top, like Folder or Section to organize things better
• Some accounts want to organize work not by spaces, but by teams and departments, so Smart Sections of Smart Folders should be on top and Spaces are not in general required at all
• Some users wants flexibility to organize left menu as they wish (~20%)
• But most users don’t bother and 80% of users do not use Favorites at all.
• Some databases can’t belong to any space, like Document, Meeting, Task, etc. so they should be somehow created above all spaces
• Spaces as a concept is quite hard for beginners, so it would be good to allow to start without Spaces at all
• There is no stable point of start → here we will add Home page.
• and more smaller requests and problems like search in the sidebar, folders in favorites section, etc.

Our goal is to solve all these problems. It seems that only part about Favorites → My Items is what you dislike. It is technically small change and it is a novel pattern. So we are taking the risk to see how it will survive in the wild for a couple of weeks. Innovation is impossible without risks and if enough negative feedback will be accumulated, we will revert it and get back to linear structure:

• Favorites
• Private
• all the rest setup by admin

[mdubakov]

@Nevil_Hulspas

(I realize I sound very passionate about a stupid sidebar, so to speak. But our 17 person team and myself uses this so much every day, that’s actually quite an annoying impact. In the bigger scheme things it’s not a big deal, but it is in your day to day work if you use it like 12 hours a day)

If you could run internal survey with questions it would help us, like:

• Do you use My Items section often?
• If not, why?
• If yes, what do you like and dislike about it?

[Wilco_Boode]

I am really looking forward the the new folder ordering that you announced. We have spaces for:
Generic team items
Management focused spaces
Projects
Personal / other spaces that require databases but dont fit any of the above

And especially the option to separate our Project, Team, and Management spaces will be a major improvement of our current setup

[Nevil_Hulspas]

I don’t disagree with the logic. My point is that you can keep all the same logic but just in one sidebar instead of 2 different sidebars. In that case you can still do pretty much all of those things you mentioned, right? You just separate it by collapsable headings (favorites, teamspaces, private), just like notion.

[mdubakov]

I don’t disagree with this as well We will do all necessary changes based on cumulative feedback from users. See this as an experiment.

[RonMakesSystems]

@mdubakov

Some databases can’t belong to any space, like Document, Meeting, Task, etc. so they should be somehow created above all spaces

I can share that we just have a “Home” space with all these things. It seems to work… Not sure if I’m missing and disadvantages of it.

And thank you for outlining the reason for these changes! It makes sense. I’m all for trying new things and seeing if they stick. Also noting that most the feedback you get here will probably be from admins and workspace creators. Maybe the members have a completely different take. But also noting that the ones who will decide to use fibery will probably be the space admins. So it’s also a question as to who you tailor to.

[bear]

Very interesting updates. Folders is one I wanted for a long time! And dependencies, cool! Thanks and much respect for your continuously good work!

[ccollins]

I wasn’t planning on providing feedback, but there has been a lot of negative feedback that I disagree with so here are some of my thoughts. Overall, I think these changes to the sidebar are going in the right direction.

I personally hate when a sidebar is excessively long. As the admin for my workspace, I do not want to create a thousand views for a thousand different use cases that people will get lost in. Even with the new sidebar search function, it is still easy for people to get lost within all the different options. I would prefer a smaller, curated list. I’ve even made a point as the admin to never use favorites, specifically because I want to go through the flow of finding the views I want, just like a new user in my workspace. To the point that all of my spaces are different colors with the views within them having icons the same color as the space. I’ve found that with a lot of spaces, this makes navigation easier for new users when I’m onboarding them or troubleshooting with existing users. If you kept everything in one sidebar, especially with the new ability to add entire spaces to favorites, that single sidebar could get messy and disorganized very quickly.

I’ve always been a big advocate for catering to less tech savvy individuals. This has happened several times before where I show them how to add items to favorites. But then I get a call because they can’t find anything. Especially when they favorited entities that are expanded to show every view of that entity. I have to talk them through scrolling around to even find the collapse button of private. In my opinion, it makes perfect sense for there to be a switch to instantly go back to the perfect, clean organized company wide sidebar.

To me, having a separate area for private and favorites is very clean. It makes the private folder “feel” more private and it decreases the visual overload of the entire sidebar when you just want to focus and only need your favorites.

But with that said, I do not understand wanting to add spaces into ‘My items’ by default. Reading the roadmap description, it sounds like the only spaces that won’t be automatically added are ones where the permissions are set to Everyone at.... I think this will make the distinction between ‘All Items’ and ‘My items’ very confusing. Permissions in Fibery are so powerful, especially with user groups, that I never use Everyone at.... We only have one space (of 20+ spaces) that uses that. Which means, ‘All Items’ and ‘My Items’ will look almost the exact same for us.

Trying to teach my users the difference between ‘All items’ and ‘My items’ is not difficult when it’s just a cleaner, filtered sidebar to house your private and favorite items. But when both sidebars look the exact same except ‘My items’ is missing a single space that is shared with everyone, I anticipate the learning curve will be higher and people won’t understand why they can’t find that one space.

Also it’s minor, but personally I feel that ‘All Items’ should be on the left side. I don’t know why, but it feels more correct for the default list to be on the left and the filtered list to be on the right. Maybe because this is a left screen sidebar with left justified text. Not sure. Also, clicking back from ‘My items’ to ‘All items’ doesn’t feel very smooth. Something about how the star color disappears a split second before switching to ‘All items’ feels laggy. This is very small issue, but if you want people to regularly switch between the two this should feel nice and look nice.

[mdubakov]

Very good points, we will think twice about automation rules for My Items and about it’s position as well. Thanks!

[Alex_Rublev]

I’ll add my two cents — I also think the decision regarding the sidebar is somewhat controversial and a bit confusing.

We have a list of spaces that the admin has carefully set up and organized to help new users quickly understand where everything is. This is the foundation. On top of this, we can add extra layers like Favorites and Private Space. But they shouldn’t be mixed together as “My Items” because only Private Space is actually “mine” and Favorites is a filter. Since Private Space is still a space, it makes sense for it to be part of the main space list.

If it were up to me, I’d go for a unified sidebar with three sections (Notion is a good reference here):

1. Favorites – for quick access, so it should be at the top.
2. Private Space – your personal space, which also belongs near the top.
3. All Spaces – the full list of available spaces.

This way, we maintain a single, structured list of spaces where two specific categories of spaces — marked as favorite and personal — stand out. The top of the list would initially be empty, which makes sense because users will start by working within the setup that’s already provided. As they get more familiar, they’ll begin organizing their own activities within it.

P.S. In Notion, the Private Space is located at the bottom, but personally, I find that inconvenient—when there are many Teamspaces, you have to scroll a lot to reach it.

[mdubakov]

Very nice comment, Alex. We will experiment more internally

[njyo]

After using the newest sidebar for a few days, and reading the discussion, my take here is:

1. Overall agree with the challenges you listed above, @mdubakov. Especially:
   1. Admin to set the structure for all users
   2. I want 5±2 top level spaces (or now folders) and then spaces inside to keep things tight
   3. Not having a start point (or a “Home” so to say), makes things tough → I think this could also be a dynamically generated page like a dashboard configured by the Admin. For my team I’v put together a basic “My Tasks”, but this could feature a Feed of the Inbox and some Reports. With some basic rich text.
2. Spacing between items matters. The top-level items should be visually grouped together in general and in the My Items. In My Items it is currently very muddled between the stuff in Private and what is favourited… because there is no visual gap between the two; or, even better a visual gap AND a title indicating that these are favourites. Same between top level spaces in All items… → cleaning up the spacing may make the whole thing better to use as well.
3. I think scrolling (with folding) beats tabs. While I hardly fold things to closure, as I observe in my Fibery or Slack usage, scrolling up and down is just much faster that toggling tabs. So I would argue as well for a singular bar with sections. → I would probably prefer a single sidebar. For the order (and name) of the major sections I would suggest: My Favourites, My Items, Shared items (this could be for team/department smart sections) and All Items (which would hold all the Spaces. And then you allow Admins to enable/disable sections…
4. Capitalisation is inconsistent. Yeah, this is a tiny thing, but AI Assistant, Workspace Map (IMHO correctly) use Title Case, while All items and My items are sentence cased. I firmly believe in Title Case in the UI headers.

Hope this helps.

[mdubakov]

All I can say is that Sidebar is hard It is one of the “it looks easy” problem, but then you spend 100 hours on it and solution is still not great.

[Bronn]

Adding my 2 cents on the sidebar.

When you have a business with a lot of areas and views, it gets cluttered. This isn’t necessarily something that can be fixed fully because business use cases are complicated, but there are things I think might help. (Others feel free to disagree with me and add other ideas.)

1. Dashboards
I’ve seen several people suggest some sort of Dashboard. While I agree this would be handy, I’m quite happy to use a document for this so we can set them up as we need for each space. However, at the moment, to add Dashboards, I have to open a space and add the Dashboard document underneath it, and then the views underneath that, etc. It starts to get cluttered and needs a lot of clicking.

Proposed Solution
Could the Spaces show a ‘Dashboard’/document when clicked? This would need an on-off toggle, defaulted to off, so it isn’t forced for all spaces but only used when wanted. This would remove a layer of clicking for some and aid in navigation. If a document, you could use it for a Dashboard, or a Read Me, or whatever else you need at top-level.

2. View Clutter
We end up having a lot of views, which I’m sure is quite common.

Proposed Solution
Since we can add views to documents, I’d like to be able to toggle a view visibility on/off so it could be hidden in the navigation panel(1). This would help for smaller views that don’t necessarily need their own pages (and users can still open these as pages by clicking the Expand button).

(1) Visibility-wise, for admins, hidden views could be shown greyed out when show databases is turned on, and hidden otherwise?

This means I could have a Dashboard document showing 3 related views, while hiding those views on the sidebar. 1 item rather than 3 = less visual noise.

3. Search
At the moment, search doesn’t show databases if they’re turned off. That’s a problem if you have lots of spaces and forget which one a database sits in.

Proposed Solution
If view databases is turned off, show database when searched, just have it greyed out (still clickable).