I remember this used to be such a lively place around the time of Chromium Edge's release. Hopefully, posting feedback here won't be like speaking in an abandoned theatre...
Feedback:
- Sort: The sort feature had been broken (for me at least) for over two years. A duplicate sort dialog would be displayed every time. Your selected sort option would be lost anyway—as soon as you closed and reopened Collections. Now, it appears Sort has been dropped altogether and replaced with Reorder. While simple manual reordering is a nice option, the loss of automatic sort by name or date is a decline by any measure.
- Moving tabs to/from Collections: My use of Collections dropped dramatically over a year ago out of frustration. Development of options for moving tabs and tab groups to and from Collections stalled just short of what was needed to make it fully useful.
As I recall, you could move one tab to collections or all tabs (maybe), but you couldn't move selected tabs to a specific Collection or a tab group to a Collection of the same name which should have been obvious capability. Another missing capabilty that should have been obvious is moving a Collection to a tab group (and back) when needed. Also as I recall you could only copy and not move in some or all cases which left us with the frustration of manually cleanup up afterwards (if you wanted to move). These few missing capabilities left me searching for solutions like the One Tab Group extension which itself is still in need of improvement. Now it appears ALL functionality has been removed except for the ability to add the current page to a collection. 😞
- Start to collect Feature: At first, I was annoyed to see Start to collect appended to the bottom of my Collections. But after playing with it a bit, I started to see the potential. First of all, the fact that the sample collection ideas have virtually no connection to topics I'm interested was a turnoff. Since my collections already have so many examples of what I'm interested in, why not use that to inform at least some of the suggestions? That one change could generate interest instead of annoyance.
However, I actually started to get excited after finally clicking the "See more ideas" button and it opened up an entire page of easily addable image collections from Pinterest. And this is coming from someone who previously just turned off Pinterest integration without trying it. But the next "taking us frustratingly close then quitting" experience is when I tried filtering all those ready-made collections to narrow down to what I'm actually interested in—and the results no longer had the nice Save on hover button, but instead flattened out into a normal image search page. The ability to manually filter and add these ready-made collections and/or have them be more relevant automatically (for those like me who are willing to trade maximum privacy for relevance) could transform this from irrelevant annoyance to a killer feature.
- Managing Collections: Lack of ability to easily select and move one or more items between Collections was another "so close but no cigar" frustration. Dragging items individually was far too clumsy if once you get beyond having just a couple of items to move. I often needed to merge collections with lots of items in them, but this was far too labor intensive to be practical.
- Backing up Collections: Last but not least, I was pleased that we could export or at least copy a collection and save it elsewhere as a handy archiving solution. The problem was, once again stopping short of greatness, it was not possible to save/export all Collections (to Excel or some other format) as a one-click backup solution. If you have a lot of collections, exporting them one-at-a-time in a way that doesn't preserve the collection structure is simply not practical.
Team Edge, what's happening to your amazing creation? I can guess that some features are being removed to simplify and due to lack of use. If true, in my opinion this can also be seen as giving up too easily.
In addition to creating an esthetically pleasing UI, good UX involves making complex actions simple for end users. I know only enough about UX to realize this can sometimes be far from easy. Lack of developer talent is not always the issue. My sense is that Product Managers and even upper and senior management need to know at least enough about UX to understand why it's important to provide the necessary time and resources. Good luck!
