Product updates

Goodbye Inbox, hello Table!

  • 7 October 2021
  • 20 replies
  • 1022 views
Goodbye Inbox, hello Table!
Userlevel 2

[UPDATE: 29 Feb 2024] The Inbox view will be removed on 31 March 2024 and from then the Table view will become the default way of reviewing your responses. Read more about the Table View here.

For details on alternative ways to view and manage your responses check this Help Center article. The reasons for the changes are outlined in Mathias' original post below.

 

Hey folks!

 

Matthias from the Product Development team here 👋

 

We recently announced that we will soon be saying goodbye to the Inbox view for Responses and replacing it with the Table view as the default way of viewing your responses.

 

Some of you have reached out with questions about the change, so we thought we'd pull back the curtain and give some insight into why we made this decision:

 

The Inbox view wasn't great at managing and exploring data

 

We received a lot of feedback from customers about their need to do more with their data.

 

Whilst the Inbox view was good at giving an overview of a single response, it made it difficult to quickly find the right information, compare answers, or detect patterns across multiple responses.

 

Our customers are collecting more responses than ever before, so we wanted a solution that would scale with their growing needs.

 

We could have tried to upgrade the Inbox view, but…
 

  • The codebase of the Inbox view was in a poor state—we got plenty of bug reports about weird behaviors that would have taken a long time to fix.
  • The interface wasn't adaptable—it was tough to imagine how the features we had in mind to improve data exploration would fit into it and we expected to hit a wall pretty soon.


We didn't want to invest time in something that would need to be discarded so quickly.
 

Instead, we decided to start fresh with the Table view. This approach allowed us to get rid of our ageing code whilst providing something new and more future proof at the same time 🎉
 

Viewing a single response

 

With the table view, you can still view a single response.

 

You can now get a vertical overview of a single response directly from the Table view by hovering over any row and clicking on the expand icon.

 

From here, you can do the same things you could do in the Inbox view—navigate to other responses, delete the response, or print it. We've also started to add new features, like the option to hide questions with empty answers 🙈

 

 

We hope you enjoy the new Table view (and the other features we've got cooking). If you've got any feedback about it, or have some other requests, feel free to share them in the comments below ⬇️


20 replies

This is extremely disappointing to hear. I run my business with the inbox view and it will genuinely make my job harder to have to use a table view. Might as well switch to (free) google forms if there’s only going to be a table view. Please consider not deprecating.

This is extremely disappointing to hear. I run my business with the inbox view and it will genuinely make my job harder to have to use a table view. Might as well switch to (free) google forms if there’s only going to be a table view. Please consider not deprecating.

Completely agree, this new table makes things much much more difficult when it comes to running my business.

I hope there will be an option to choose between table and inbox. The new table layout is a very unnecessary, counter productive change. Not a fan at all. This is already proving to add precious time on to my business tasks.

Shoot…. i had started a form assuming it still did the inbox form…. the TABLE IS USELESS!!!!

Userlevel 2

@ekehrwald @Woody167 @GBakery 
I'm very sorry to hear that this change has disrupted your workflows and really appreciate that you've spoken up about it to give us this feedback. I'd love to learn a bit more about why the Table + expanded single response view aren't working well for you compared with the Inbox view. Product development is ongoing and with more information we can try to make improvements to better suit your needs. Feel free to write back here, or if you'd prefer to talk instead of type, I'd love to give you a call to learn more. If you're interested, you can directly book a slot in my calendar by filling in this typeform.

Because we are collecting individual orders and do not need a Totals page.  We need the ability for a custom to order a cake and to print out that individual PDF.  I have already started looking for another site to create a form that will print onto a pdf for me.

Userlevel 2

@GBakery thank you for elaborating. You can still open up a single response (displayed vertically), by clicking on the expand icon in a row (see the gif in the original post). From there you can print out the response on paper or as a PDF using the printer icon.

Does this solve the problem?

p.s. I’m trying to figure out whether people are not aware of these features or whether they don’t solve the problem well enough to decide whether we need to improve awareness or the features themselves

Userlevel 5
Badge +2

Personally, this update makes my job much easier 🙌🏼🥳 The majority of my Typeform use is collecting qualitative data from market research responses, client discovery forms, quiz responses etc – all data that I want to view side by side to for a high-level analysis to see trends. 

Also, if I do need to deep dive into one particular customer I see that I can also expand and download individual responses so that covers that concern. 

Thanks for this product update 😅 @mattkentz 

Badge +5

HI @GBakery @ekehrwald @Woody167 if this change is important to you I’d definitely take @mattkentz’s offer. By taking to him we’ll be able to better understand how to improve and evolve this feature. 

I encourage you to fill in his typeform. It’s not often that we have the opportunity to speak directly with the person behind the steering wheel, so this is a great chance for you to make an impact. 

Hope you can make the time to chat to him!

 this doesn’t make sense, i use the inbox view every single day and so does my team. The table view is not helpful for us,

Inbox view is incredibly important and used daily in all areas of our business. This was supposed to happen in 2021 and we spoke with someone and they allowed us to have access to inbox view again.  I’m not understanding this post either with the updates … will inbox still be available even if it is NOT the DEFAULT view? Without inbox view, I will not have a use for Typeform unfortunately and will have to find a new software. 

Userlevel 7
Badge +6

@RyanTripp @katepiff1 - the last post was two years ago.. there are no new updates… i don’t think you need to worry about anything at this point.. 

@Liz - any thing you have heard?

 

des

Hey John, thanks for the response.

I’ve attached a photo for reference. This is a message that is PINNED at the top of the responses page when viewing the “INBOX VIEW”.


And upon clicking, it redirects here..


Which states that the inbox view will be REMOVED, and that table view will be the default view.

Does this mean that the current inbox view will become inaccessible??
I’ve contacted support and really hoping that this isn’t the case.

The current inbox view is something that our team relies on heavily each day of the week, and table view is nothing but a complete pain and does not provide us any benefit.

Hoping to seek an answer, or better, that the inbox view will still be accessible, instead of needing to go an alternative route other than typeform.

Thanks, 

Ryan
 

Userlevel 7
Badge +6

@RyanTripp - apologies.. i had not seen that message ..my bad.. not reading the top of the screen i guess lol.. thanks for pointing it out to me.. because i use the table view as default, i did not see the message until i switched over to inbox view. 

Most of my analysis of results is done in Google Sheets based on Connect-ion 

 

@Liz - this should probably get its own thread in the Community - something that is a current-year post and not the 2yr old one.. 

 

 

Userlevel 7
Badge +5

Hi, all! We are removing the inbox view, I’m afraid. @James should have some information coming out shortly with the notice you’re seeing above. 

I was very frustrated as well when I saw the upcoming update. 

 

After Matthias  mentioned the expand option, I find it now very useful. 

 

So it will not be a problem that INBOX view is not available anymore.

 

Also, the expanded view it is much quicker to scroll than inbox view.

Sad to hear of this change. We use Typeform for many things, including intake/ job applications. When people apply we need the ability to simply browse recent submissions using Inbox view. This is ideal for long form answers and it isn’t fair or helpful to have to click open for each response in Table view to read full answers. How is it harmful to keep inbox view available? How many people switch over to inbox now that table is the default?

In related news, I haven’t found any integrations that can download individual responses to Airtable as a PDF either, so removing this view will really affect us negatively.

 

Please reconsider.

@ekehrwald @Woody167 @GBakery 
I'm very sorry to hear that this change has disrupted your workflows and really appreciate that you've spoken up about it to give us this feedback. I'd love to learn a bit more about why the Table + expanded single response view aren't working well for you compared with the Inbox view. Product development is ongoing and with more information we can try to make improvements to better suit your needs. Feel free to write back here, or if you'd prefer to talk instead of type, I'd love to give you a call to learn more. If you're interested, you can directly book a slot in my calendar by filling in this typeform.

Link no longer works. Calendly not set up.

Userlevel 7
Badge +5

Hi @SUPR I’m afraid this feedback call expired a few years ago, but feel free to share any questions/feedback you have here in the community! 

I find the Inbox view 10x better.. I don’t understand why you need to take that out since many people like that better?

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