Idea for a cleaner and more pleasant dashboard

hey, nice work, if you want to contribute with design, I can give you pointers how to do that really well 🙂

sketch is nice but its not addressing a lot of issues

let me know if you want to contribute to the actual build!

I understand the points made, and they make sense. However, as an experienced user, my approach differs. For example, I never use templates; I always start with a blank template. So these models are just visual pollution to me. Likewise, the resources section also becomes redundant over time. After becoming familiar with the platform, resources such as links to Discord or Twitter lose their usefulness and become mere unnecessary visual elements.

yeah, onboarding is more important for new users

new user experience is of major importance for the platform

we can make those things hidable if someone finds them distracting

From what I understand, the platform's focus is on users without knowledge of web development?

Not quite. It's still an advanced platform but we need to do everything we can to make it more accessible

It's not black vs white

I think there is a little more research needed on this part

In which sense?

For example, in user onboarding, asking these types of questions, whether they are just looking, whether they are going to create a website for a client or whether they are trying to do it on their own

is a very common type of questionnaire in low-code products, for example

there will be all sorts of users

the way I decide on things is based on principles, not on stats

But wouldn't it be interesting to know who the biggest audience is and focus updates on them?

no.

audience changes, we are early in

focus here is on what direction I am setting, its based on trust in my and team's ability to navigate the direction wisely

most things you will learn from stats is gonna be useless

e.g. you said you don't want to see the resource links, if 70% say the same thing does it mean we need to hide them?

no it doesn't, but maybe we need to add an option for the user to hide them if they need to and allow them to find it again somewhere

it all boils down to the dna of the product

users will choose if they like it or not

I agree with you, I'm here really trying to understand the "DNA" of the project, as I'm interested in participating in the creation of something like this, I believe that visual development is really the future, as I'm a web developer with over 13 years of experience , and I build pages in 5 hours with visual builders, whereas it would usually take me 6 or 7x longer to code

Everything I said here is based solely on my opinion, as it is the only one that I understand perfectly, like you, I don't really like statistics and I prefer to trust my knowledge and understanding of the subject

Short version is DNA is POWER made accessible. Meaning we don't compromise on power or capabilities, but we do our best to make them more accessible

in other words we don't make things simpler to use by compromising what you can do

another important things is we align everything on how the web platform works

so we don't hide things and we are using the same terminology

@Oleg Isonen

Did a quick wireframe on top of this idea. I think the complete onboarding needs to be thought about. Maybe additional resources needs to be added.

But at least a good start would be having the option to dismiss the resources if they are familiar with the platform.

Would be happy to connect separately to discuss if I can collaborate and contribute to figure out the full onboarding flow

We need to focus on other things for the next couple of months, I want to continue the work on dashboard as part of workspaces feature.

I don't think in its current state in needs urgent investment

Currently priority is CMS, marketplace and variables.

May I chip in on this?
Hi, I'm Andy, UX/UI Desperate Designer. I'm a super new user with absolute zero knowledge of coding. I just make pretty emotional rectangles on figma, that's what I'm good at.

I think I understand the direction you want to take with this platform and I applaud you for keeping it financially accessible to anyone. Speaking of capabilities, I get that you will not implement a figma plugin, but if you could make it easier for dumb designers like me to understand and use the tools webstudio has to offer perhaps you could help us recreate our projects without the need for a plugin.
For example. I work a lot (like, really a lot!) with auto-layout components which is something I haven't figured out yet here. How can a designer achieve the same result with WebStudio? Or things like the Box element: is it the same as a frame in Figma? What are its limitations? Could there be a simpler way to present these functions without compromising the experience that's already in place? You know what I mean?
Things like these could make the software more accessible to those who don't speak coding and even someone who makes rectangles could perhaps be able to create real websites.

I hope it makes sense, I haven't had dinner yet... ✌️

if you could make it easier for dumb designers like me to understand and use the tools webstudio has to offer perhaps you could help us recreate our projects without the need for a plugin.

This is my ultimate goal to make it as easy as possible, without sacrificing capabilities.

For example. I work a lot (like, really a lot!) with auto-layout components which is something I haven't figured out yet here.

Autolayout in figma is just flexbox without a bunch of flexbox features. So it really obeys similar rules and we took inspiration in figma's UI for it. You should be able to get the idea simply by playing with it.

Or things like the Box element: is it the same as a frame in Figma? What are its limitations?

On the Web there are html elements that have meaning for accessibility, functionality and search engines. You need to read the basic info about those. Box is our abstract for all the html elements that have no functional difference, only semantic/accessibility. Mostly layout html tags right now. But if you are too new to web dev, ignore that info for now and see Box as a fundamental building block or container for anything on the page.

Could there be a simpler way to present these functions without compromising the experience that's already in place? You know what I mean?

I think you want to have less choices and you don't want to accept that web platform is fundamentally much more complex than figma. We don't force on you to learn all of it at once, that's the point, but you have to get educated over time. You can't get full web dev done based on figma primitives, its just not enough.

Things like these could make the software more accessible to those who don't speak coding and even someone who makes rectangles could perhaps be able to create real websites.

I think you misunderstand the philosophy here. We are not trying to build a platform for a subset of the web just to make it easier to understand. That would be very limiting and low-power aproach, that is basically what framer is doing.

We want to let you discover how web platform works without having to maintain infrastructure and become an engineer.

We are giving you a tool to build for the web with the full power of the web, without becoming an engineer, but you will still have to grow into a visual developer knowledge level over time. Its a much biger chunk of knowledge than pure design in figma and we are making it possible so that we can elliminate the handoff.

I'm totally onboard with learning and taking advantage of all these things, I kinda have to! Framer is cool, in my opinion it's a super dumbed down version of figma and webflow smushed togher and it's all just bells and whistles. But it's also a total nightmare 95% of the time and it's super expensive. However, it's becoming very popular among designers because it's familiar with what we know, that's why so many designers ditched webflow with the quickness!
My point was not to ask you to make a product more similar to framer, I never expected this to be a substitute of it anyway. My point was to question if there's a way to smooth out the learning curve for designers without compromising what you're offering to devs, engineers and whatever. Maybe it could be just more tutorials for dummies, who knows? We want to be your friends! We come in peace!

Absolutely, I am sure there are many things we can do. What we really need is to identify the big pain points and see how these can be helped with.

UI Designers are the pain point!
One thing you could try for the time being is to focus on the similarities rather than the differences. We're all doing pretty much the same thing, just using different tools and languages. So maybe you could start by answering the question "how can I (a UI designer) achieve this X result in Webstudio?" Doing this, should help in the future highlighting the actual pain points.
As of right now, without knowing anything I still managed to create something decent. It's not super scalable, it's not appealing, but it's something. How I did it? I have no clue. But I did it nonetheless, so there are more similarities than differences. It's just a matter of understanding how to translate my way of doing things into yours.

Its not like I am unaware of general differences. its just there must be some starting points, generalizing is not helpful

Please provide specific feedback, super specific

otherwise this is not actionable for me

Ok, I will start a new thread/post here with all my feedbacks and perhaps I'll ask my designer friends to give theirs too.

that would be great, please make sure feedback is focused on problem definition, not on solution