Another round of shiny new Beta updates from the past week!
We appreciate the continued feedback and stay tuned for more updates coming soon!
Kate
thanks Kate, these look pretty good, kudos to the team
Great updates - I’ll switch to new workflow tab if/when those new canvas views get shipped! The primary issue right now for me is not being able to see what’s going on without excessive scrolling, closely followed by not being able to navigate between workflows intuitively (the app’s ‘geography’ isn’t as obvious as it was with the tiled workflow view)
I tried this since the day it came out, I’ve been bubbling for near on 8 years. I love the way it looks but dare I say it’s just not as easy to use as the older and somewhat more ugly editor.
Recently I had to switch back when working on a large workflows
Where are the loops
Release at next Bubblecon 
whoever is in charge of product roadmap should be fired.
I tried the beta when it first came out and switched back to the old way after an hour or stumbling through it. it’s much more tedious than the old way, looks pretty but significantly slows down dev time. there’s more clicks needed for the same outcomes.
other features that have been released in the last 6-12 months have been basically pointless whilst core functionality in the backend is still broken (after years of it being like that) and even more of the critical functions are breaking down more/getting more buggy as you focus on these new features and neglect the existing ones. you keep adding floors to the house without strengthening the foundation and the cracks are showing.
tighten the ship before a competitor does it for you and takes the market. I love bubble and what it can do, but you need to course correct and fix the existing features and bugs before rolling out new ones.
They have done a lot of work to speed things up and make things reliable behind the scenes. I’ve been here almost 8 years and performance and reliability has got significantly better.
However they do miss the mark a fair bit so I know what your feeling.
And it can be frustrating seeing other platforms ship so quickly, reliably and on the mark.
I can’t work as fast in them as in bubble so I’m still here.
That and I know almost every workaround, I can’t be bothered learning every other workaround on any other platform.
I’m really surprised by people who applaud and cheer for everything said from the stage. With the new UI update, we gained a few things, but we also had to sacrifice many others. This is a change, but it’s by no means an evolution. With years of experience, they should be developing much better interfaces, yet they keep repeating the same mistakes, unfortunately. I’m saying this as a Bubble developer with 7 years of experience. Just read the forum posts—people still have to ask if they can move workflow items to the right within folders. Even a junior designer wouldn’t make such a design mistake, I think. If Bubble wants to continue growing, it has to start respecting its developers.
It’s a beta… an opt-in beta… it’ll get better, with constructive feedback - and I doubt comments like these actually help generate anything positive.
I know the team working on the workflow tab checks this thread every day and is implementing a lot of the feedback here, it’s just not an overnight job!
I don’t believe they have qualified UI/UX designers in their team. If they did, users wouldn’t have to point out silly design mistakes en masse and assume the role of designers. If they do infact have qualified designers, then @josh or @emmanuel should really clarify why community members have to spend so much time spoon feeding basic feedback.
Opt-in beta or not, valuable development time is being put into this project that could be better used in other areas. So there should really be no room for underbaked releases (again, opt-in or not). You never see other no code providers or SaaS providers in general spend so much time on such basic things. These changes don’t even warrant footnote space in their update logs but here we are…
None of this matters compared to the expression composer. Try replacing a field in 10 expressions and you’ll start to question why you ever started with Bubble. Like, the lack of modularity working inside of expressions is insane, you can either copy and paste the ENTIRE expression or none of it. The UI doesn’t look great but it’s fine, it’s whatever. I’d like to see them focus more on functionality rather than design, like a FIND & Replace feature tied to the App Search, for example, rather than just changing the look.
Figma recently got a lot of backlash for making some ill thought out changes to the UI (which they had to roll back), so it’s not just a Bubble thing. The main problem is this: The designers and PMs and engineers do not develop Bubble apps.
You can’t have a useful understanding of how to improve the platform (beyond abstracted things like performance) if you’re not developing a big production app. You need to build, get annoyed, and want to fix the annoyance. If you’re not getting annoyed by something and you’re just changing things due to a theory, you’re going down the wrong path.
It needs to literally be something that they’ll get a bonus based off of. Like you get an extra $10% salary for building a fully-featured Bubble app according to a rubric.
If I sound annoyed while writing this, it’s only because of the lack of annoyance felt by the designers/PMs.
This is the main problem.
By the way, after noticing numerous issues and shortcomings, I decided to develop a project called “better bubble.”
It will be a project that eliminates certain issues with the things we use daily, such as database performance, crazy wu problems, lack of query flexibility, missing components, and the use of features like custom states, repeating groups, and tables. I’ll share it on the forum once it reaches a certain stage. I’m confident it will be a tool that many people will love and that will significantly speed up development.
It is kinda interesting how companies suddenly having millions in the bank stop using customer input. It happens, every, single, time.
Put a few initiatives online, ask the community who would like to collaborate, and you have amazing UX/UI screens for free. In a few weeks.
Now there are probably 10+ Bubble employees busy for months and the result can be read all over the place.
In my understanding beta/opt-in-beta etc. can have some minor feedbacks on UI and can have some bugs in its functionality.
Feedback in this thread are quite fundamental and reasonably serious in nature which question whether any serious thought was given to UI/UX or not; whether the prototype was really tested on real users or not; whether the interface was really used by people who use the editor or not etc.
The vocal few do not represent the majority. Those that have good experiences won’t have much to say in the thread in the first place. Regardless of the definition of what constitutes a Beta, it is what it is. Released for testing to real users for feedback.
Historically, the majority of the forum users have voiced out that Bubble release public betas for new features. So they have been listening to feedback.
@georgecollier is right in saying that non constructive criticism and name calling doesn’t help. Some comments posted are in very poor taste. They dilute the thread and I find them stupid.
Don’t like the beta, don’t use it. If you choose to use it then provide some constructive feedback instead of hurling insults. We can’t expect others to view us as professionals if our conduct doesn’t reflect it.
This comment is worse than any non-constructive harsh criticism , if people really listen to you and stop doing beta then it is called ‘‘Echo Chamber’’ , every new feature would have lots of politically correct and soft criticism, after that step by step going further away from reality thus further away from better product. You call harsh comments ‘‘Stupid’’ , the comments you don’t like, people reference what you are doing as ‘‘Academic Circle Jerk’’.
Hence, be careful what you wish for every comment is important to advance Bubble, apart from the ones that written with bad faith of course.
I agree. It’s very clear that whoever is in charge of product development/managing the dev teams doesn’t build apps in bubble.
If they did they would focus on fixing all the existing bugs before adding new bells and whistles that “look pretty and market well”. function over form should be the driving force but it’s not.
every time I see a new feature in beta I’m frustrated because the core functionality of bubble is still buggy and broken. why add new things when the existing things aren’t working.
I test all the beta releases but 90% of them I turn off again within an hour because they are worse than the existing or add little to no value.
the new workflow builder for instance is much worse than the old workflow builder. issues:
the useability of the new design is much worse than the old design and that was apparent within a few moments of testing it and the core bugs in the backend workflows remain unresolved even though they are much simpler fixes and would have a far greater impact on useability.
the existing workflow editor was FINE so why spend all this effort to change something that is functional and working… fix the other stuff that is not-functional and a pain in the butt. product dev 101 lol
Hence why I followed up with
I’ve seen users come and go over the few years I’ve participated in the forum. There have been some regrettable losses, but the community still stands. On the flipside no loss if a few bad eggs decide to leave.
I stand by calling personal attacks on Bubble staffers stupid because they are stupid.
