I have a suggestion for improving the user experience: it would be great if we could add items to our lists directly from the “All items” view. Currently, if I’m not mistaken, we can only add items to lists by clicking on them and changing the metadata (which took me a while to figure out!).
The current system feels a bit rigid, as it only allows one change at a time. If we wanted to reorganize our lists, we’d need to go through items one by one, select them in the main list, and add them to the new list(s). A system that allows for bulk changes to item lists would make document organization much easier.
Yes, very good point! Jack and I have discussed batch editing functions for items in a near-future release. At the moment, we’re envisaging a button next to “Transcribe” and “Export” saying “…”, with a few options:
Add items to list
Remove items from list
Delete items
Are there any others that you think would be helpful?
Great, a button next to “Transcribe” and “Export” is precisely what I thought it could work!
I have a couple of additional thoughts about the lists feature:
Sublist & parent lists:
Currently, when you add an item to a sublist, it doesn’t appear in the parent list. To make it visible in the parent list, you need to click directly on it, but this selects all sublists by default. Then you have to manually deselect the sublists you don’t want. It would be more useful if all items in sublists automatically appeared in the main list, giving a comprehensive overview (I have a screen record showing this but it cannot be attached here!).
List and sublist renaming:
When renaming a list or sublist, the text field starts blank instead of showing the current title. It would be more convenient if the existing title was pre-filled, allowing for easy editing.
This is really helpful, thank you! I definitely agree on the second point—that’s on our list of things to implement.
Jack and I have had a few discussions about the list file structure and we decided in the end that lists should be like folders, where items in a subfolder do not appear in a parent folder. But we’re open to rethinking this. Could you talk us through a little more how this would help you to organize your documents?
Can we add another bullet point to move the item to another existing list, with a drop-down menu? That would avoid the double passage of removing the item and then adding it to the list.
I’d like to add a few suggestions regarding lists as well. Intuitively, I feel like I should be able to click and drag items from the table in the middle of the screen and drop them into lists in the overview on the left, adding them like that rather than through a dropdown in the metadata table. Would that be possible?
I just tried adding several items to a single list by using the checkboxes and selecting the list I want them to be in from the metadata dropdown box, but that only moved one of the items. It’d be great if it could move all of the selected ones… and maybe if any metadata adjustments automatically apply to all selected items, with an option to append or overwrite data if there’s already something present in one of the boxes.
I actually didn’t know sublists existed until I saw this thread. I’m wondering if it would be clearer if you could also make a sublist via the “add list” function, like you could choose to either make a list or make a sublist, and if you choose the latter you can select which of your lists you want it to be under. I don’t know if that would be too cluttered.
Finally in a similar vein I think it’d be useful to have a “add list” button in the metadata table at the bottom of the list of lists that would just perform the exact same function but mean it would be accessible from the space where you’re adding items to lists anyway.
Hey Daan, thanks for all this! We’re about to release an update where you can drag and drop single/ multiple items into lists, so these issues should be fixed very soon! As for batch editing metadata, that’s a smart idea for UI that I hadn’t considered before—when multiple items are selected, to use the metadata panel on the right in the dashboard view to make changes to multiple items at once.
We’ll have a think about ways to make the sublist function more obvious. It probably doesn’t make sense to add it as an option in the way you describe because the plan is to get rid of the modal for adding new lists when the user presses “+” and instead (as in Explorer, Finder, and other basic file management systems) just create the list immediately then have inline renaming.
It definitely makes sense to have an “add list” option in the list selector in the metadata panel. Have added that to our list of tasks for development. Thanks again
