Introducing the new App View Pane - 77% faster than before!
Dear Podio Users,
Happy New Year 2022! ✨
As part of our continued performance improvements, we decided to give more love to the App View pane! The Podio team has been working behind the scenes on both performance as well as UI improvements to optimise the View Pane User experience for you.
To start 2022 on a high note, the changes are now live for you! ⭐️
We made the following changes:
- Stop Auto Creation of Views for each new Category field: We have stopped auto-creation of views with every new category field you add. Auto creation will only happen once at the addition of the very first category field.
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App View Pane UI optimisation: The following UI Changes have been made to the View Pane User experience:
- Separate tabs have been introduced for Team Views and Private Views to ensure segregation and easy navigation
- The App Description has been made collapsable to ensure enough scrollable area for Views
- Fresh new look to align with our new Podio UI - We have brought the 'Add New View' button on top, changed the look and feel of view names etc.
- Pagination in View Pane: This was done to improve the load time of the App View Pane. At the time of opening an app, you will now get data for the first 10 views only. As you scroll further, Podio will get you the next batch of views, optimising the overall performance of the view pane.
Note: Stopping the auto-creation of category fields is available for both old and new UI but the other changes will only be available on the new Podio UI. Switch to the new UI from "My Account" option:
Learn more about Podio's new look.
More Information:
For performance improvements to the get_views API call, we introduced a new endpoint to fetch view data in batches (instead of all at once) to reduce the View Pane load time. To exemplify this, take an app with 100 views. Now instead of loading view data of all the 100 views together, we will now get data for the first 10 views only when the app opens. As the user scrolls, API call takes places and Podio will get them the next batch of views.
The feature was being tested by our Beta users since November 2021 and we have seen notable load time performance improvements with the new API endpoint:
- P95 Response Time/day was reduced by 77%*
- Max response Time/day was reduced by 89%*
*Observed for Beta Users and Podio Partners Network
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The new look & breakout allowing Team OR Private views to be selected is a great addition. I will say we have views setup around a sales process. The views moving up due to "most recent activity" has cause a lot of confusion. We have over 2,000 users across the different versions we support and overall this specific feature has not been positive feedback. Is there anyway to turn recent view movement without having to go back to the old look?
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I agree with REI Automation Squad. Love the tabs, strongly dislike the constant shuffling of the order of views. This has created confusion and backlash against the new UI in our organization. With 50+ users and dozens of views for some apps, the only view that stays where you left it is the default view. This means that users have to repeatedly search for the view they want. I'm not sure how this qualifies as improved UI design when it adds time, effort, and frustration for a basic function. I understand that there is no one size fits all, but I have difficulty understanding what the benefit is. My guess is that because Podio now only loads the first 10 views and the Last Used View might not be in that set you now have to move the views around. Maybe you could add an option that allows us to choose Last Used View or Default View when we load an app. Or you could add a third tab for "Recently Used Views." Cheers!
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Another thing: when someone tries to change a filter, the filter updates every time they add a new field in the filter. This is wasteful for me, for example, if I want to create a filter that has several fields filtered. It also seems to me to be a waste on your resources since the re-loading has to happen even when it is not needed nor desired. If there was a means to say, "I'm ready to implement this new filter" and then have the filter updated, that would enhance my ability to create or update filters.
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Right now, a view includes both the filter (i.e., which items should be shown) and the format (i.e., which columns are included, the width of each column, the sorting, etc.). If you could separate out the filter and the format, so that someone could select a filter, then select a different format for the same filter, I believe it would reduce the load on your system because you don't have to re-filter the data as often but merely change the layout of the data, and someone who, like me, is continually wanting to see the same data in different formats, would not need to have as many filters and would merely select the format - which also would eliminate the need to get Podio data quite as often.
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Selecting dates in a filter is a problem for a couple of reasons.
1. We can't just enter the date, but have to click on the back or forward arrows. I don't know how this would impact speed of loading a filter, but it would make it much faster and easier to select dates that are longer in the past or future.
2. We have to cancel both the start and end dates of the date range in order to modify the date. Why not enable an edit of the dates (i.e., when you change the date range, you start with the start and end dates that are already being filtered and just change those instead of having to start over with both new start and end dates).
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What prevents Podio from enabling searching for a view before every single view loads? It seems that most of the views I need, I remember the name of or at least part of the name. If I could search for the views, they would not have to load unless I wanted them to. Right now, the only way to search for a view is to load all of them, make sure all of them are visible (scrolling down very often), and then search for them in the browser "Find in page" feature, which causes very much re-work, frustration, and the use of human and data resources.
In fact, the idea in above paragraph coupled with having a separate "View Refresh" button, which enables the update to the view list (left hand panel) to occur only when I want the list updated, it seems would significantly reduce how often the views need to be loaded, thus considerably reducing computing/server/overhead resources.
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Absolute rubbish - it looks great, but give me a break, "Why are views now moving around? This is a nightmare as our team is confused as to why views are changing places/locations in the sidebar?? "
CAN SOMEONE IN PODIO PLEASE FIX THE VIEWS MOVING AROUND AND DISAPPEARING WHEN YOU CLICK AND DRAG.
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I agree with Andrew Thibault and everyone else, The last used view moving around is slowing down our productivity and creates a lot of confusion. Please change it back!
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Agarre Tecnologia Glad you liked the new look! I'll take back the feedback about app description to our teams.
PI R2 Can you elaborate a bit more on the issue you are facing? If it is about scrolling more to find views that are at the bottom, I would suggest rearranging views or make use of the Private view tab to access them quickly.
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Hi Sumedha Panwar,
Thank you for the work to improve the loading of views. I believe there are some other methods that might work to improve the speed even more.
I might be wrong about how things work, but is every view's full data being loaded into the page every time, or just the name and a link to the view?
If the view list was just a name and a link instead of loading every view's full data into the page, I believe the speed would be geometrically improved because it seems that just a list with links shouldn't take that long to load. Then the link will take you to the view that will take a short amount longer to load for each individual view.
Also, if the "sort by" was expandable and contractible, then when someone wants to see the expanded version of the "sort by", it would load that data - otherwise, the default could be contracted. It seems that this would reduce the speed of loading the basic list of views.
Thanks for listening.
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Another enhancement, I believe, would be to have individual's own sorting of their views. A few different methods could be implemented: 1. they choose the order of Team views for themselves - not for the team, 2. their most recent views are bubbled up, 3. their most-used views could bubble up, 4. some combination of these. Then the loading of the most recent is much quicker because the user is directing to the most likely one they will use. It seems that would possibly significantly reduce the load on the server and storage access.
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PI R2 One can switch to the old look from one's account (the menu with a picture, from the upper right group of buttons).
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The 'Last Used View' was introduced to replicate the behaviour of the old view pane where whenever you come back to an app, the view which you last interacted with, gets auto selected. Unfortunately, we do not have a way to turn off this behaviour. This 'Last Used View' will always be located in the 3rd position in the view pane and is refreshed only when the app is refreshed.
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Andrew Thibault The last used view feature was implemented in the new App View Pane to replicate the behaviour of the old view pane where whenever you come back to an app, the view which you last interacted with, gets auto selected. You are right that because in the new App View Pane, we make use of pagination i.e only the first 10 views are loaded when the app is opened, we had to introduce a placeholder for the Last Used View on the 3rd position in the App View Pane.
However, thanks a lot for the feedback. I'll take it back to the team and discuss it further!
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