Hey @randy and team, thanks for trying to stay on top of it. I’m a dashboard developer and manager myself, and we have users expecting to have three dozen filters working against millions of records and a 200+ -column-wide main data source to have response times as instant as their iPhone app buttons. (I have also brought up for years that several parts of the above sentence are all afoul of best, or even SANE, practices, but the requirements are what they are).
So, I know the struggle; I just brought it up here because it did seem inordinately slow to me and I didn’t know if that was the norm. When every click yields a period long enough for the user to go ‘did it register or did I miss the click?’ I thought it might warrant a look.
We are grateful to you all for the concerned, slightly-frustrated and well-intentioned feedback. Long-time users know that the add-on UX has always been slow. It’s a mix of three problems: a) it’s trying to do too much, b) how we’ve architected the UX, and c) how inefficiently the Google APIs interact with the sidebar. There MAY be an exacerbating problem of Google rate limiting the add-on with increased usage from the surge of Mint users. (Today, we reached out to Google to see if there are close-in improvements they can implement to improve performance.)
Unfortunately, there isn’t a quick fix, but our whole team is in Washington right now planning improvements and updates. This thread has definitely rung some alarm bells and we’ve had discussions on how to make improvements.
@randy I have an experience that I feel like could fall into problem a). I remember Tiller before the add-on UX when I just updated manual account balances in-sheet. With the introduction of the sidebar I had a new process where I started going in and selecting the manual account from a dropdown and entering the latest balance in a box there. Because I have numerous manual accounts, this workflow has always felt slow and cumbersome, waiting a couple seconds every time for the existing balance to get pulled only so that I could overwrite it. Recently it dawned on me that I could just set-up my own manual account balance updater sheet. It pre-populates everything except for the new balances. After I update them, I just copy and paste the new lines into the Balance History. It saves me a considerable amount of time and I can order and group the accounts however I like. Maybe this would be an alternative idea and the user could simply select “Commit Manual Balances” from a drop-down like the drop-down that exists for “Fill Sheets”.
The add-on UX has always been about the same speed for me, not massively slow but it was never snappy. One of the slowest parts in my experience has been the Connected Accounts. Like with Manual Balances, I just simply stopped using the sidebar once I realized that I can achieve the same at my.tillerhq.com.
The sidebar is definitely a nice addition and super useful in many ways, but I feel like those two could be rethought - just my humble opinion.
Thanks for the feedback, @KyleT. These are good ideas.
The Google add-on API is really slow in round tripping information. For example, you click a button to create a manual account balance, we request the full Balance History sheet so we can see what accounts are used in the sheet and what their last balance is, we receive a response, we reduce the data to unique accounts, and we render it in the sidebar. All of these steps (and a few more) are running to just expose the sidebar UX. It definitely shouldn’t be this slow but that query and response often take several seconds (moreso if the Balance History is large).
Your hack for creating new balance entries is a good one. There is nothing magical about the way we are populating them (i.e. through the sidebar) but some users just prefer a sidebar UX. I think your solution would be an interesting Show & Tell for users frequently creating manual balance updates.
The Connected Account management UX has been similarly slow but for different reasons. The sidebar just interacts slowly with Yodlee’s Fastlink tooling. I agree using the Console is a better experience and we hope to build that out with more features in 2024 as the best experience cross platform.
Hey @richl does it seem any better today? We haven’t done anything specific to address it but have reached out to Google about whether or not we may be getting rate limited.
You didn’t ask me, but I’ll just observe that it doesn’t seem any faster to me today than it was last week. (I’m a noob, so I only have last week to which to compare it.) I refreshed my accounts this morning through the console (much more pleasant than the sidebar) and then did a fill, and it seemed to take the same amount of time it was taking last week.
I would say it may be a bit faster, but not much. Today it took about 7-9 seconds to open the add-on ( did it multiple times) but then it took about the same amount time when you click on any link in the add-on