57 // Small Product Update

Apr 9, 2023

In the last newsletter I mentioned that people are having trouble understanding what a menu item is. Is it a page? What is a view, why are all blocks shown in every menu item?

I’ll soon push out two things aiming to improve this.
You might have to have seen the product to understand what I’m talking about.

New menu item options
Instead of just a plus icon that created a new view without filters, there are now two options here, and more will be added in the future (with view templates).
The first option in the new dropdown menu will trigger the same action as the old button. The “Open page” one will open a dialog where you can select a block, which will open that block’s children, so instead of creating a view without any filters, a view is pre-populated to filter for a block’s children.
That’s similar to the “open children” option on a list item. So I should still update the UI copy to be a bit more consistent there. Maybe I’ll change “Open page” to “Open a block’s children” or something like that.
Menu item naming
Previously, menu items would be named manually, which let people think that a menu item is a page and that blocks there would only be within that view. Just like the previous new menu item button, it didn’t help with explaining that every view has access to the same blocks/data.
old
new
So for example opening a new view without any filters will now say “All blocks”, as all blocks are shown in that view, instead of saying “new menu item”.

Adding a filter to that view would than auto-name the view. E.g. filtering for “Journal” and for anything created today would show “Journal, Today”.
What I haven’t decided on yet is whether one should then still have the option to rename an item manually. If it’s allowed, so let’s say I’d manually name above example to “Today’s journal” and the filters are changed, should the menu item’s name change with it?
Another idea I had here is using AI to create the names, so it wouldn’t always be the generic list of filters like “Journal, Today”. But that might be overkill for now, and would open new problems, like communicating privacy implications to users.

As always, I’d love to hear what you think about my thoughts!

–Emil