Rant on:
I agree it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what the “wish” is here, but the underlying “pain point” is the UI.
I believe the argument, and maybe I’m conflating with my own arguments here as well, is that Fibery is extremely powerful in its capabilities and a heaven for nerds like me/us who deeply enjoy using those capabilities to ease our and other’s lives. But as much as we control what happens in the back-end, especially with scripting and API, and we lack on the front-end, which is the first touching point of every actual potential user we’re trying to convince.
While Fibery is and was extremely strong in managing (store, generate, transform) data, it lacked in the department of showing it. And while things like multiple entity views, dashboards, improvements to whiteboards and more added A LOT, most of those were absolutely core and necessities to even begin with (e.g. multiple entity views are HUGE).
Still, the UI feels a bit “clunky”. If UI was great, we might not be having this discussion, but this probably makes us thinking: what if we would have a similar amount of control over the UI? What if we could create “Dashboards” within Entity views, what if we could format field names, group fields together, have control over how compact they are etc.
Fibery with an excellent UI.. wow. Add full table capabilities incl. in-cell formulas, pivoting, cell coloring.. (true GSheets integration?) and you easily have the best product in the segment by far.
Now, if it’s possible to allow the nerds you’re targeting to also customize UI, and the fact that I can install an external add-on (Fiberflow) in 20 seconds and fix some of the most basic UI problems with a few lines of CSS code makes me believe it is, it might be the most game-changing and unique feature ever. And what better way to get fulfil the impossible goal of (subjective and company & context dependent) “perfect” UI, than to allow tailoring?
Now here’s an idea: integrate the idea of Fiberflow (or Fiberflow itself) into Fibery. It could be a regular Space Template, “Fibery Plus”, “Fibery Tweak”, “Fibery Design” or “Fiberflow”… where a CSS Script entity holds a piece of CSS customization code, which somehow can be “injected” to the users via automation when enabled and reverted when disabled.
This way, people could customize, present and share individual tweaks like many already existing in Fiberflow, or even entire Layouts, in the form of space templates. Maybe there could be an integration which synchronizes verified tweaks and templates into the space?
With some additional templating-enabling databases you might be able to define font sizes (e.g. Space, indent level… in sidebar) in a regular entity field where the script reads the variable from? I don’t know, I’m brainstorming.
If this is dreamt too big: the UI still needs some urgent improvements. I feel like it should have been a significant part of the (recently released) strategy but it was barely mentioned.
At the end of the day, you got us nerds already in the pocket, and part of your strategy is for us to convince others of Fibery. Where I had most difficulty with that (basically my colleagues), was due to the UI, and basically having to convince that the other benefits outweigh the initial UI limitations, which only party is unfamiliarity.
Most people are used to Spreadsheets, where you show a lot of information in such a nicely formatted way in a single window, due to grouping, highlighting, and overall formatting possibilities.
Then they are asked to try Fibery, where first impression is this overall feeling of “clunkiness”, and unclarity.
-
Lack of “visual distinction” of information pieces belonging together → I call it visual clarity:
- Lack of control over semantic grouping of fields (e.g. Address, Personal data etc. fields..)
- Lack of (control over) distinction between expected input fields and informational fields (could be view-dependent)
- Poor “label-to-content” contrast
- Tabs of Entity views
- Tabs of pinned Relation Views
- Field names:
- To-many Relation view can show lots of information, especially with multiple views within, but it takes too much conscious effort to scan and understand where to click. Relation name and views within are too blended background.
- Using to-many relation field with views within is a necessary work-around for many workflows, which I might want to describe in form of a title, but I can only use relation name.
- Rich text field headers are barely visible, this becomes especially obvious between two RT fields.
- inefficient use of space overall
- incl. extensive padding
- worsened by the problems above
- Visual clarity in sidebar
Also pretty basic things like
- no header wrap & no wrap for relations
- no dynamic row sizing
That being said I love Fibery and have followed Fibery’s development for over 4 years now (dopamine hit each Thursday 
), and I am confident you guys will continue to improve Fibery and I will continue to get that dopamine hit each Thursday (i.e. build on and use Fibery)
/rant