Winter’11 Setup/Logout in dropdown, inspired from Facebook ?

Winter’11 gave an interesting new location to popular links like “Setup” and “Logout”. They are no longer one click available, you have to click your login name in new interface header to see these links. In first appearance I thought its fine. But over the time when I was working in my winter’11 pre-release org and sandbox orgs. I found it little annoying to make 2 clicks to access “Setup” & “Logout”. 

Dropdown inspiration from Facebook !

We are habitual on one click logout, even the same stands true for links like “Settings” which can be related to “Setup” link of Salesforce. Most of the popular sites like twitter, gmail etc give one click access to logout and settings link. Only exception to this is FACEBOOK, which hides logout and settings link under a dropdown. Following pic tries to relate Salesforce dropdown to the Facebook one.

Why this dropdown is sensible on Facebook ?

This looks sensible with Facebook, as we rarely click on any “Settings” link, we are too busy to even read the complete news feed 😉 For me “logout” link is the same story, Chrome(browser) remembers me on Facebook forever. If I ever logout or need to re-login on facebook, I have to do “forget password” get recover my Facebook password :-D. So for Facebook perspective, having these links in a drop-down seems good UI decision and saves some real state too.

Why this dropdown is NOT sensible on Salesforce ?

In Salesforce, story is very very different from Facebook. Here is how :

• We need to click “Setup” too often. This is specially true for developers and admins. So its not like Facebook, where many users doesn’t even understand how much they can do with Settings.

• We need to “Logout” many times, I usually work on 5-6 different Salesforce orgs in a day, across many projects. Again, its not like Facebook, where you can remember your self forever in a browser.

Views & Ideas of Salesforce community on Winter’11 Dropdown.

Following are some tweets, that strengthen my feeling about issues with new winter’11 UI.

• http://twitter.com/greenstork/status/26202653178 : Really questioning some of the UI/UX decisions with Winter’ 11 like location of Setup link and lack of Nav in report builder

• http://twitter.com/Force2be/status/26402872908 : I created a #GreaseMonkey script to restore the Setup|SystemLog|Logout links to #SalesForce.com: http://ow.ly/2Op2z (correct link)

• http://twitter.com/awilber/status/26428085201 : Setup link gone in Winter ’11. This is like suddenly having to hold down SHFT to hit the space bar. Please vote. http://bit.ly/c1dNuv

• http://twitter.com/DarthGarry/status/26408485529 : Winter ’11 took away my setup link, I want it back! | Salesforce.com Ideaexchange http://ow.ly/1r10FC Thanks everyone for the RT’s!

@TehNrd created a GreaseMonkey script to open the drop-down on hover, so saves the extra click. This can be a good idea for Salesforce to make it default behavior. For more details click here.

So its clear that people really loved the original “Setup” & “Logout” links, no body wants a drop-down. Their is even an idea posted on IdeaExchange, to “Bring the Setup link back out of the name dropdown”.  Please promote it, you know we want the links out of the drop-down !