I keep seeing “this is for the future” and “this allows us to have branching and looping”. I think both of these things are irrelevant as it relates to the UI/UX issues everyone has consistently pointed out.
Moving to more efficient code is cool, that sounds like a “future” thing, the people that keep mentioning the future as rebuttal only point out things about branching, BUT branching can be done vertically and horizontally. Why are we being forced to use an inefficient view for something that is not reliant on vertical stacking?
These do the same thing, but one has a much more expansive view. This is not a request to “switch back”, it is a request to simply make a new view. Why does the language of the Bubble team make it seem as if making a horizontal view with the new editor is just impossible?
It’s not that simple. I do agree this should be a toggleable “overview” mode but you have to consider the following:
When the screen cuts off during a loop, you either need to do weird tangling or have the lines come from an invisible source on the left to indicate it’s part of a loop. In a vertical flow you can just keep scrolling down with no interruption to the lines.
Using a more verbose setting (i.e. Compact Mode) that exposes more information about each action makes it very hard to see what’s happening horizontally.
You need to change the direction of the scroll to horizontal which I’ve seen on some landing pages but is not native to most UXes.
Bubble has basically decided to treat the workflow editor like a code editor rather than a freeform “canvas” approach that is becoming increasingly common in builders/flowchart tools. The former positions it as more of a serious coding tool and exposes the fact that Bubble is actually a programming language in of itself. It’s a philosophical choice more than a straight UX choice.
I personally don’t like huge changes with short notice like Bubble has. I especially hate it during testing and pre-production when we are moving from Bubble DB to an external DB.
It is always better to gently support Bubble customers by giving them the option to choose to move to a new workflow when they are ready.
Well, I complained about this new WF version and although I have adapted to it a bit and new improvements have been made since then, I still have some concerns, such as reduced productivity, more work to find some things, some bugs already reported, etc.
But I know that many improvements are still possible and this is a path of no return. However, I also believe that the new editor will force people who were not organized (didn’t use folders, colors, etc.) to get organized from now on, in a way they will have to adopt good practices.
I already used these things, so for me it hasn’t changed much. But I still think some improvements would be very welcome:
More colors would be welcome to make it easier to identify a few more categories of actions. Of course, colors helped a lot more in the previous version (more colors have been requested in the past, but I still see good use for them in this new version).
A view of all events (not actions) on the right, when we open the WF section for the first time or even by clicking on something like “All WFs” as we had in the previous version, would be interesting.
A note identifier in events (on the left) when they or some internal action have notes and/or maybe the possibility of searching for notes on the current page/WF tab.
And since the “trigger tracker” has been added, another interesting thing would be the possibility to track Custom Events and API Workflows that are not tied to any trigger. We know that in some cases they are used in the app, but triggered by external events or serve as endpoints, but there are other cases where they were simply created and forgotten there, without use.
A search box to make it easier to find a specific WF when all of them are in folders. I know, an “Expand/Collapse all” feature has been added and now we can use the Browser’s “Find feature”, but would be interesting to have this nativaly.
The same menu and options that appear when clicking on an event on the right side should also be available on the left side.
There are many other improvements already requested, but in my opinion these would be some of the ones that would help a lot in this transition.
And who knows, in the future, an option to switch between a horizontal or vertical cascade of actions, this would practically cover both versions in one, with the improvements of the new version.
Did you know that the “WF dropdown” on top left (after the page dropdown) have a search bar? I agree however this should look more like the design tab search bar instead.
Before I could search in more details WF and actions while it seems like now you can only search the generic action.
For instance, before I could type Set state + the specific state, while now you can only search set state as the specific are removed from the search making it a bit useless.
Did you name/rename it correctly? I have no issue if my Set state is labelled correctly. But I think that Bubble just name it “Set State” actually by default while it was more specific before…
Hey Bubble can we please search also what each action does like we used to do in the past rather than the action only?
For instance, I was looking to search the action “Show” + the specific element. Unfortunately, the new layout only shows me all the “Show” action without being able to further narrow down my search to the element that is shown. However, this search was possible in the past.
Like I said, just rename them. @fede.bubble Seem that we lost the original automatic naming that it was before. Can you ask team about that? We shouldn’t have to rename everything that was named by default correctly in the old layout…
I have thousands and thousands of actions which could be easily searched before and now I am supposed to go through each one of them and rename it? That’s insane.
I understand if that was the initial logic when I start building the app. Indeed all my elements in the design page are properly named. However, this was unnecessary in the previous WF editor as they were automatically labelled. That’s how I always looked for WF and actions and today I can’t anymore. Okay, I can spend hours going through each of them and rename them all, but an update shouldn’t remove what was good before and make it extra work today.
I’m getting used to the new workflow editor. I’m probably 75% of the way towards ‘if you change it back, I’ll be annoyed’. I didn’t appreciate the sudden change without a revised launch but I can see the team are listening and updating all the paper cuts, for that, I’m grateful. It’s probably not easy to keep us bubble noobs happy
I think they are super stoked on icons and emojis. The issue with names and icons/emojis in the design canvas around names. I personally never change the name of the element, and I allow Bubble to autoname them for me for the most part it does it properly, but if I need to change it, I do not remove the words ‘Text’ or ‘Input’, but I recall a lot of other developers said they do and some seem to prefer emojis of shorter versions like Text becomes txt or Group becomes grp.
I could only imagine Bubble has some statistic stashed away somewhere the would indicate some 92% of users don’t keep the names that are autopopulated as to rationale why they dropped the autonaming from the workflows…or perhaps it is done intentional to open up some magical future functionality
Yeah, I’ve never really understood this? Maybe they’re all being paid hourly!
I kind of just name ‘important’ groups (e.g a header, perhaps a specific card). If it has a workflow, it’s generally named so that instead of just being Group K it’s Group user card, for example.
Bubble has, with its default names, come up with an imperfect but universal naming convention which makes it easy for a dev to hop on an app and understand.
Maybe I’m old, but I still can’t bring myself to use emjoi’s in anything. I had to tell ChatGPT to settle down writing technical documentation because one day it decided all my headers needed Emojis…
My naming convention in Bubble has always been ‘Element Type’ ‘Module Type’ ‘Description’ So Input Text becomes Input Inventory Inventory Description Which has drastically improved searching and editing.
