Brand Color themes changed

Remon_Toma
Participant III

Hello,
i noticed that in Brand. color themes some colors disappeared now all only white or dark.
why that happened we were using the remaining colors

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  • UX
38 REPLIES 38

I noticed this as well. I was counting on one of the color selections which is now missing. This will likely cost me. Itโ€™s a bit disheartening that they just yank a feature out from under everyone without any notice. What else will they do this with. I will pay close attention the next few days hoping they return. In the end appsheet may loose.

it will cost me too, really weird !

@morgan Any insights with this?

morgan
Participant V

Hey everyone,

We intentionally removed the option to change apps to a full-color theme. The appearance of existing apps will not be affected. We made this decision as a part of our effort to improve our app designs, with a focus on the content of the apps, rather than the chrome around it. Weโ€™re definitely interested in new and more tasteful ways to incorporate your branding, and plan to have some additional options for you soon! If supporting your brand in your apps is highly important, please feel free to direct message me โ€“ Iโ€™d love to hear more so that we can incorporate your feedback into our future improvements!

Thanks,
Morgan

You intentionally made a terrible decision. With nearly 1.7 million apps created, one would think that you might ask your customers how they feel about decisions being made for them. The customer should be the one to decide if the want the focus to be on the content of the app they created or the chrome around it, or both. Appsheet should take a second look at how their customers might be affected when features or capabilities to which they are accustomed to using, are pulled from under them.

I read the following quote from Appsheet in a blog post. I loved the stance they have as a company.

โ€œAs weโ€™ve said more than once, customers are a part of our team. We are so grateful that you are on this journey with usโ€

It doesnโ€™t feel to me like Iโ€™m on any team when things like this happen. Just my humble opinion.

Thatโ€™s a shame about the colour schemes. I spent quite a bit of time making sure my colors, logos and formatting were as coordinated as possible

Why?
Colors themes in the frameworks are a big part of color brands!
All brands had their distinguished color.

This is not goodโ€ฆ

I am confused. I see the theme controls like in the image below. Was it not like this after the initial change?

From my point of view this is the same as the old dropdown list of Themes, we are just selecting the background and text/button colors separately.

What am I missing?

2X_c_c30b2dd199dd07bfea7a72e7c17d153ca94e7b40.png

Bad move. With the new theme there is no visual separation between the header / footer menu bars and the data. This has the exact opposite of the intended effect as you canโ€™t tell where the menus end and the data begins. It is visually confusing and just from a straight presentation standpoint it looks MUCH worse. I have had multiple people during demos immediately ask me what happened to the nice attractive layout. They are so distracted by the new weird look that I canโ€™t even get them to talk to me about the data. Face it - the decision was bad. Donโ€™t wait 5 years like Microsoft to undo a bad design decision. Fix it or at least give your saavy user base the option to overrule your heavy-handed โ€œimprovementโ€

Jonathon
Participant V

Iโ€™ve been hoping AS would go the other direction with regards to brand theme colors for a long long time; i.e. let us specify the primary and secondary colors.

This move is definitely a step backwards; hopefully its a necessary step backwards for something net better.

@Jonathon, I completely agree. I was really hoping the next UI update would give us more control over the themes, not less.

Itโ€™s even more disappointing that they did not communicate these changes to partner developers. Otherwise I would have created a starter app for each color, since theyโ€™re allowing existing apps to retain the old themes.

@morgan is there a dev channel that partners could monitor to get a heads up about changes like this next time?

Like @Jonathon and @GreenFlux, I also request AppSheet team to consider enabling any of the color combinations for the app themes, enum buttons and slider controls, just the way we can select any color through Hex color codes in format rules.

I agree! But if I read the writing on the wall correctly, they will probably let it sit like this for a while, and then when the dust clears, youโ€™ll notice another little sneaky change.

1.White theme color 1
2.White theme color 2
3.Dark theme color 1
4.Dark theme color 2
5.Multi color theme 1(Pro Plan)
6.Multi color theme 2(Pro Plan)
7.Custom color theme (Enterprise Plan)

@Lynn you are right about one thing. It is a shame!

@Jonathon I couldnโ€™t agree more in terms of backward movement. I would consider it more of a leap though rather than a step.

Appsheet, I just donโ€™t see how you can paint this as a positive thing. My dad had a saying. โ€œDonโ€™t pee on me and then tell me itโ€™s rainingโ€. And thatโ€™s the first thing that pops into my head every time I think about this issue that you have blessed us with.

Appsheet is an amazing platform, but things like this and per user price drives me away.

QREW_Cam
Participant V

I totally like @Jonathon 's idea

Would love to see the choice of Light or Dark theme to be togglable in app(Or toggled by the OSโ€™ settings), with a primary and secondary color using hex-codes. With the ability to use those two colors inside of formatting rules

On my wishlist

On the topic of choosing colors, I once tried to change the color on a โ€œDisplay overlayโ€ action via a format rule but couldnโ€™t get it to work. If this is still not possible, I wish it were.

Yes, I think it would look cool to be able to change the color of overlay actions.

In support!

Telpro
Participant II

and some app color refer to their logo color tooโ€ฆ

Also, I think everyone so far would agree that getting rid of those colors is a step backward, not forward. You should definantly put the old colors back, seeing that the large majority of people liked having the old colors as options. Instead of taking away options, you should try to add options that are better than the old options, or instead of taking away old options, improve them, or change their tone of color. Thanks!

TCP
Participant II

I do not understand why removing this feature is good. This makes it VERY difficult to read the primary views for people using it in the field.

That pallet is not working any more.
If you change the theme and then change the color, your frame color will be gone. to with or black

Please elaborate. I have been able to change from light to dark background AND affect the Primary Color of text and buttons.

What do you mean by frame color?

I wanted to respond to everyone in this thread who shared opinions on this change.

First, let me apologize for the way the change was rolled out. What we needed to do was (a) post something in the community showing what we planned to do, (b) listen to feedback, ยฉ incorporate the feedback in what we do. That would have better guided our changes and also helped explain them to all of you.

Learning from this, we are now following this approach and it is already leading to better outcomes. See Long view names

Now, back to the question of why we are doing any of these changes to the UI of the apps. One of the core principles in AppSheet is that you donโ€™t need to be a developer to build a successful app. However, app adoption also depends on UI/UX design. If the design is not good enough, most end-users tend to avoid adoption. They are conditioned by the quality of consumer apps that we all use on our phones and devices everyday. These consumer apps set the UI/UX quality bar. Typically, every successful app in the app stores has one or more UX designers craft every element of the user experience.

Now most of us are not UI/UX design experts. I am not either. However Morgan and Carie on our team are. I have set them an ambitious goal: how do we ensure that all apps built on AppSheet have great UI/UX design without having a UX designer custom-design them. In aggregate, this is likely to maximize adoption for all of the apps all of our customers are building. This can only be achieved by some combination of constraints (some things you cannot do) and guidance (some things the platform advises you to do). AppSheet is five years old now. Some choices we made and UI features we allowed at the start may no longer be the best choices to carry forward. Anytime you constrain a system, you are going to aggravate some people who want flexibility over everything else. However, we have also seen that flexibility on occasion put to poor use resulting in poor outcomes (despite the best intentions of the app creator).

I share this background mostly by way of explanation. I feel if you understand what we are trying to achieve, you will be able to better guide us. We are on this journey together. Whenever I hear strong negative reactions to something we did, I know that those folks are really strong and passionate believers in our platform. They are frustrated or disappointed by something weโ€™ve done, and we need to learn from that.

In this case, we believe that the theming/styling options that were removed are not aligned with UI/UX principles of modern apps. While this is a subjective judgment, there is some good evidence of this. But we need to do more to articulate these principles more clearly. Also, we need to add more elegant ways to establish branding/theming (along the lines of many of the asks in this thread). Sometimes as a practical matter in a large complex software system, we have to clean up old stuff before we can put in new stuff.

@PublicSafetySystems, I do hear you. Within our team, we have had long discussions about how we should have handled this better, and how to ensure that we treat all of you as valuable members of our extended team.

I love it

Thanks @praveen!

Iโ€™m sorry to say it, but objectively speaking (I have polled many people) the change is not a good one. I am fine with giving new options, but there is a large contingent of developers on here that use and present these apps daily and vastly prefer the original UI. I think you need to put more trust in your user community and listen to what they are saying. Iโ€™m sure Morgan and Carie had good intentions, but having spent hundreds of hours developing an app and receiving rave reviews that literally overnight turned into โ€œHey, dude - what happened to your App? It looks all washed outโ€. Would it really be so difficult to provide an option to return color to the header and footer? This reminds me of Microsoft who spent a decade trying to convince people that the โ€œModern UIโ€ of Windows 8+ was better with no Start Menu. Give the people what they want - donโ€™t die on this idealistic hill!

So. What you are saying is that all โ€œmodernโ€ apps have only white or black headers???

I find that limitation hard to believe.

If you are going to make these kind of enforced UX/UI decisions than perhaps you should share some UX/UI best practices to support these decisions.

Instead of yanking UX/UI features out from under your core community. Why not provide some guidelines for good UX/UI design principles. At least then your core community can understand the rational behind your decisions.

In addition, when you make these kind of wholesale changes. Perhaps you should at least make an effort to update your help files so that everyone doesnโ€™t think they are crazy when the help files say one things but the actual development environment says something totally different.

Given the reaction of the community of these unannounced branding theme changes. Perhaps you could share with us what the Product Management plan is for addressing these issues along with an anticipated timeline.

if our only choice is to create either a white or black app, then I seriously need to consider a different platform.

Your making the assumption that everyone using this platform has zero UX/UI experience. While there are certainly some ugly apps Iโ€™ve seen in the sample apps and portfolios. Not all of us are clueless when it comes to UX/UI.

But anyone serious about producing quality apps is probably also serious about their branding.

Bahbus
Participant V

Jamie,

Firstly, there is no need to be passive-aggressively rude about it.

Secondly, the whole theming/color system needed to be completely re-worked to match modern design guides from Google. Ways to add more color will be coming back eventually when they are stable and ready. The old system was tacky/clunky. Iโ€™m sure they were hoping to be further along with their improvements on it by now. But these arenโ€™t style changes made solely at the whim of a few people at AppSheet.

Thirdly, app design and website design are two separate concepts.

You can let them know you donโ€™t like the change, as many have done, without all the extra.

You are right. It was extra. I was very frustrated and upset going into a demo and not having any good options to recover what I believe was taken from me in error. I also felt from reading otherโ€™s posts that their wishes (and now mine) were being discounted and that maybe I would get some traction with AppSheet where they clearly had not. But it was the wrong approach and I will adjust my post. Thank you.

hru
Participant V

Just to share my temporary solution to this issue.

  1. I have created a template based on a sample previous apps to keep my apps - brand color.
  2. Add the background image to keep my apps - brand image.
  3. Adding a repeated steps such as adding users table. The user table will be connected to the cloud SQL to enable other persons in my domain take the benefit to reduce the repeated steps.
  4. Make necessary setting to keep it consistent and can be used as a template to start apps creations.

  1. While waiting for AppSheet completing the update on UX/UI, donโ€™t touch on the theme and primary color settings.

I am not sure if the above is a normal way to do or is a bug, but I get what I want for time being.

Ps, I am new to Appsheet, sorry if the above is not applicable to your case.

A visionary, and a problem solver, thanks for posting!

Kyle_Grieb
Participant IV

Would be nice to have the Theme selection (Light/Dark/None).
Miss the nice cool color of blue, was calming for me, the light theme is a bit nuisance.

How ridiculous that on a platform designed to help people make custom apps youโ€™d take away a critical feature for people to be able to skin the apps the way theyโ€™d like. You have a great product allowing people to build apps and customise them yet you then want to control the way โ€˜theirโ€™ apps end up looking! Why on earth???

Please read the post #24 by praveen in Dec 2019.

I personally feel the new interface is SO MUCH better than the old clunky one. Its much more intuitive and flexible. Coming from a development background myself, I can see that AppSheet is setting up its theme capabilities for great things to come.

Be patient as this interface get built! Submit Feature Requests to vote for the features you really wantโ€ฆat least in addition to the complaints!

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