Dear Hackers,
I have great respect for your efforts to continuously develop pgAdmin 4, and it has certainly come a long way since version 1.0. Not to mention, it’s free. Thank you for all your hard work.
All that said, I think making the new Workspace layout the default in v 9.0 was a regression and not an improvement, and already I see issues[1] raised[2] from users.
I use pgAdmin and DataGrip every day for writing queries, and I have a fundamental issue with the new layout. Having the object explorer in a pane to the left of the query editor is a standard setup, and rightly so — it’s hard to remember names of tables and columns, and drag-and-drop makes life easier. Having a layout that requires me to click another pane and disappear the query itself, then click back, is too many steps. Autocomplete doesn’t fill the need.
Yes, I understand I can switch to “Classic,” and I’ve done so. But I want to be an advocate for newer users and others who are upgrading and won’t really understand what’s going on, where in settings to change the layout, etc.
A more gentle user experience for this type of change would have been to have v 9.0 keep the “Classic” layout as the default and alert users upon first launch that a new workspace layout was available — and explain where in the settings to make the change. Small popups announcing new features are a standard UX feature these days.
That way, people can move on from the familiar to the new and know that they can switch back if they’d like. Trust me when I tell you that many, many pgAdmin users are students and people new to SQL who need hand-holding from time to time.
Thanks for listening,
Anthony
