Every day, teams build a lot of stuff in Hex. Our users create and edit thousands of projects, from a quick ad-hoc dive for the marketing team, a metrics dashboard for the CFO, a forecast tool for the sales folks (and – inevitably – dozens of “Untitled Projects” just for your own safekeeping 😉).
This is great— more insights are being generated from data! But it leads to a classic problem: it gets harder and harder to find the right stuff.
So today, we’re releasing a new workspace homepage that makes finding important and frequently accessed projects easy. One of our early beta users said it best: “all the stuff I wanted to access easier is now easier to access”. Mission accomplished.
To see what’s new, you can watch this short video tour of the new experience, or read on for more details.
🍱 Relevant information at your fingertips
Our previous homepage only showed your most recently viewed projects, resulting in a barren experience for anyone logging into Hex for the first time. It was also near-impossible to discover new projects, or anything that you hadn’t yet viewed.
The updated homepage adopts a “bento box” pattern, with dedicated sections to help you pick up where you left off and discover new projects:
Jump back in to your recently viewed projects
See what’s popular this week in your workspace
Discover Collections that are being updated
And keep a pulse on your organization by seeing the recently published projects
This new homepage also highlights Collections more prominently, ensuring that if you’ve put the time into curating your projects, users in your workspace can benefit more easily.
🎴 Know where you’re going with Project Cards
Our new card representation of projects help you know what you’re clicking through to by including a preview of the app, and relevant metadata.
Also worth noting: if a project is published, these links will now take users where they expect — directly to the published project by default. If you want to edit the project, you can also access that from the homepage.
And if you miss the old list style, you can toggle between the two on the Projects page.
⭐ Keep track of your favorites
Favorites (formerly known as Starred Projects) now have a new home in the sidebar, making them easier to access from all parts of the homepage.
And, Collections can be marked as favorites too, making them easier than ever to access.
↔️ Responsive resizing
We’ve put a lot of work into making this homepage more responsive to various screen widths, with a collapsible sidebar that tucks away at smaller widths, and better spacing to make the most of large screens. In fact, some might even say it looks good on, say, a pocket-sized screen, in case you wanted to scroll while on your favorite mode of public transit.
🧘♂️ A structure that feels zen
Along the way we tidied up a ton of the page structure, using space more effectively and reducing clutter. Workspace Search and Notifications have more prominent homes in the top bar, making these useful tools easily discoverable.
Out internal team have been using it for a few weeks, and already can’t imagine living without it.
📣 Check it out and let us know what you think!
While you’re clicking around, may I suggest some background music?
We’ve built this new homepage to be extensible — new sections, and even new ways to list projects are on the horizon. Let us know what you’d like to see next to make the homepage even more useful to you!