I support Elena's request - why not give users a choice?

Hi Elena, thank you for your feedback. We're keen to understand which parts are more user friendly in the old view, so we can optimize them with our UX team. 

We've had significant feedback that the vertical workflow view was very cumbersome to use as it displayed less information, not making use of full screen estate of monitors that are more widescreen than vertical, which resulted in lack of clarity and endless scrolling.

Additionally, we have plans to evolve the product in the future including more functionality in this view, and the vertical layout would not allow us to easily extend the functionality of this view in the future. So it is also a move to set us up towards future capabilities.

As to why we don't maintain both: It essentially boils down to doubling the development. Every time we would add functionality or make changes, we would have to do it twice for something that solves the same use case. As such, we decided to retire it, after an adjustment period, so that we can rather use our development capacity to work on further improving the product further in other areas.

I know this is a big change to a main screen that we have been used to now for a few years, all I would ask is give it a chance and get familiar with it, and hopefully over time you will grow to appreciate it 

Luis Lopes said:

As such, we decided to retire it, after an adjustment period,

Thanks, Luis,
When did that adjustment period start - and when do you envisage it to end?
To us, this came as a surprise...

As you know, we haven't been using this for years because we only moved to Team a few months ago. Having just about mastered the shift from GroupShare to Team, we now need to familiarise ourselves with a new UI again. While trying to get our business done, of course.

Best regards,
Ralf

Hi Ralf,

this was released last Monday. The announcement for Team was only posted yesterday unfortunately, which is why it was a surprise:  Trados Team - 24.11.1 Release
We are working on improving this process, so we get announcements out at the same time for all product offerings.

We are likely to leave the old view for around 3 months, to have sufficient time to adjust and give feedback on further improvements.
It's very rare for us to redesign a view as extensively as this one, but it's something we had on our plans to do for a long while based on feedback, so hopefully it won't happen too often going forward.

Thanks,
Luis

Thanks again!
I do like surprises but not in this context... ;)

Good to know the legacy layout will be around for three months.

Best, Ralf

Hi Luis, it seems like my earlier post wasn't published. Thanks for your quick reply, I understand that keeping both layouts would mean a lot of work from a development perspective.

To answer your question: I find that the vertical layout is more user-friendly because (i) I can scroll up and down easily with my mouse whereas I have to manually scroll using the bar at the bottom of the page in the new layout. And on my screen I do not see the entire workflow when using the new layout so that effect is lost on me. Also (ii) in the vertical layout I see only the information I am looking for with just one quick look - without lots of additional info that makes it more difficult to spot what I am actually aiming to change, etc.

At the end of the day, it's as you say. If there's no way round it, we'll get used to it somehow. Thanks again.

Best, Elena

Perhaps I can give you a hint here: you can also scroll horizontally with the mouse if you hold down the shift key. It's certainly a matter of getting used to it.
But I also find the old layout more practical because you had all the relevant information at a glance. The new layout tends to confuse me.

I did not know that, thanks!

I'll say this was also an unfortunate surprise to my team as well. We are big fans of the vertical scrolling and that you don't have to do horizontal scrolling. I order to scroll horizontal, we have to click and drag on the scroll bar or press shift as an additional key press. Without being able to collapse workflow steps, there is a lot of additional noise when working on workflow configuration that is not needed. At a high-level, you are not able to see who a step is assigned to beyond the image or initials. 

We look to have no choice, but to learn to like it as the easier to use vertical view is gone in 3 months.

Thanks all for the feedback, it's very helpful. We'll work on improving this view based on the feedback. Keep it coming if you have more feedback.