| Announced on | Rollout starts | Rollout ends |
|---|---|---|
| April 27, 2022 | Oct 1, 2022 | Oct 31, 2022 |
Note: The date was changed to be pushed out from August to October until filtering capabilities are available.
Starting on October, 2022, we’ll be rolling out some changes to pagination in views and the sorting behavior on user profile pages. We are doing this to ensure the future performance and scalability of views, and to improve your overall user experience. This announcement explains what we’re removing and changing, what to expect, and what to do before it happens.
This announcement includes these sections:
- Why is Zendesk making these changes?
- Cursor-based pagination for views
- Changes to sorting user profile pages
Why is Zendesk making these changes?
As explained in our earlier announcement about changes to views sorting and ordering, there are some major infrastructure changes happening in the backend for Views. This is going to make the performance of views more consistent and less reliant on the scale and complexity of the view. Larger active ticket volumes will have less effect on the performance of views. This will also start to open up feedback improvements to the views interface that were previously blocked due to the technical limitations.
Cursor-based pagination for views
Zendesk is supporting a new pagination model called cursor-based pagination (CBP), and as part of this broader shift, we’ll be switching to cursor-based pagination in views as well. It allows for much faster response times than offset-based pagination at any page depth and improves the overall performance and loading time of the views.
This means that we are removing the ability to skip pages in a view. You will no longer see numbers as part of the page controls such as these:
Instead, each view will include page controls for First, Next, Previous, and Last.
What you need to do
We recommend that you create views with multiple, specific parameters to produce more narrowed views that surface more relevant information. For example, if you have a view where you typically skip to page 5 of 10 in order to see tickets assigned to a certain person or group, you can create a new view with an additional parameter for the assignee.
If you want to see the last page in a view, you can do a reserve-sort using one of the columns in the view. For example, clicking on the Requester column will sort tickets based on requester names, putting them in alphabetical or reverse alphabetical order. There will not be an explicit option for jumping to the last page.
Changes to sorting user profile pages
We will be removing the ability to sort tickets on user profile pages by Subject, Requester, and Group (see Viewing a user's profile in Zendesk Support). For example, if you click these column headings, nothing will happen. You will still be able to sort by other columns.
What you need to do
Make sure you understand that you will not be able to sort by certain columns on user profile pages in the future. Aside from that, no action is needed.
103 Comments
This is very inconvenient when we need to count or sort tickets in high volume views to approximate volume of certain ticket types.
Couple points with removing these functions:
This is terrible. This will make life much harder with no gain. Good way to push your users away.
Does this impact API calls too or it’s only a UI concern?
Is there any changes coming to the amount of Views visible to agents? E.g. more than 12?
Is there a way to see this change in our sandbox before it's in production?
This sounds like it could have a significant detrimental impact on how our teams work, in the email communicating this change you suggest that you also expect this when saying:
'To help minimise the impact of these pagination and sorting changes to your workflow, Zendesk is introducing filter controls on views pages by the end of Q2 2022. This on-demand filtering will offer a quicker, easier, and improved user experience, and can accommodate use cases in which you may need to skip pages'.
I understand that the first change is laying foundations for future improvements but could you not wait and introduce both changes at the same time given you know the first change will cause pain?
Is there anyone who actually OK with these changes?
vote Up if you are happy with it / Down if you are not happy with it.
Why are you removing sorting options? The subject sort is very helpful in sorting tickets. The hyperlink you have for viewing a person's profile sends to a page that doesn't exist.
Also, the new paging system ends up with people having to click blindly and no longer have visibility on volumes.
We often sort views when we have a large number of tickets to check for duplicates, so this would make this task a lot more difficult.
Very concerned over the below updates coming.
We (like most other customers) have views currently set up for our Teams which use these features, removing these features will have a huge impact on the performance of us and our customers. these latest updates do not make any sense.
These updates need to be retracted before the suggested date of implementation 28 July 2022.
Hopefully the performance improvement is significant. At the moment I find myself having to refresh the views or page several times to view updated tickets on the Agent Workspace (as these do not auto-update for some reason). Thus, if this change improves such performance issues, I am all for it despite the removal of some features.
These changes make absolutely no sense for users with high ticket volumes. My team regularly skips to specific pages when viewing lists of tickets and sorting by subject line is an absolute necessity, so I don't understand how you can remove them in the name of "progress."
Support Agent - Jeremy - If you lose the features to filter tickets, then what is the point in auto refreshing.
Lydon McGrane
I agree this update is extremely concerning and doesn't improve logging tickets.
It actually makes working with Zendesk Support much more difficult.
Time to look elsewhere maybe?
Brett L The way I understood is that the "sorting" will be limited. Hopefully the filtering feature is improved and not removed (at least based on the 'mysterious' Q2 changes described)
Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but there's some conflicting information regarding the change to pagination.
"Instead, each view will include page controls for First, Next, Previous, and Last."
then further down in the "What you need to do" area:
"There will not be an explicit option for jumping to the last page."
Not having First and Last options to jump to would be hugely detrimental when handling large ticket volumes, and reverse sorting by a certain column may not be sufficient.
Also, will the change to cursor-based pagination also bring about the option to easily change how many tickets are displayed on a page? E.g. 100 instead of the standard 30?
I fail to see how this is in any way going to be an improvement to our user experience (as suggested in the email announcement). This set of updates is concerning, makes no sense for handling high ticket volumes, and will ruin perfectly efficient workflows that many of your users already have set up.
For example, not being able to skip by page number removes a function that my team uses every day to get to particular Issue codes. Having to make views for each issue code that we regularly jump to wouldn't be a big deal... if the sidebar would allow us to set more than 12 to be visible.
You say in the email announcement that these changes will improve overall user experience. All I see are proposed changes that make working with Zendesk Support more difficult.
I do hope that you'll take the (at least on this article) near universal negative feedback from your users that these changes are concerning and don't improve user processes, and retract these changes or drastically improve them from what's been stated here.
Agree with above comments. Not having the ability to select the page we want to go is a huge deal from the customer side. While it may help with performance on the back end, the design is a huge negative on the user experience end. With large ticket volumes no one has time to click page by page till they get to the page they want to see. Additionally I also like the above suggestions of increasing the number of tickets per page as 30 is not a lot on one page.
As a user of the software I read this as "we are removing some functionality because we are having problems with maintaining acceptable performance levels."
It seems like many changes are being made to improve performance but at the expense of the user experience. Removing simple and basic functionality such as sorting seems like a way to cover up some bad design decisions in the past.
Was this idea every presented to community before the decision for the changes are being made?
Just to echo the concerns of other customers dealing with high ticket volumes. This will impact our workflow for triaging which we do several times a day.
This change would end up affecting our workflows for both big volume days and emergent issues. While we have time to figure out adjustments, how does his change benefit me and my teams?
If the intention is to improve functionality, what is your suggestion to identify duplicates? Currently we sort by requester in order to identify duplicate tickets and this change makes that impossible. Looking forward to your response as I'm very concerned about the impact here.
Ditto to the above. A whole lot of "we're removing" and not a lot of "we're adding" abilities.
I already have lots of view and do not want to create more "narrowly focused" views.
I see no benefits to your customers, only to your programmers.
I agree with the above comments. The recommendation to create unique views based on groups/requester/subject lines to replace the sorting feature doesn't make sense when the Zendesk side bar limits the number of views you can actually see. Our team has high volume of tickets, and we'll also jump to a page to look at timestamp so we can do quick math about how many tickets we have until we reach goal. This change will negatively impact our workflow.
Echoing the comments of previous posters, these changes, particularly the loss of the page number functionality, will greatly impact our operations teams. Just in the suspended folder alone, I can envision this adding almost an hour a day to our Ops cost. Finding a different platform provider would be inconvenient, but if Zendesk continues updating things that ultimately decrease usability, we may be forced to look elsewhere.
Y'all WHAT? We typically have a hundred or more pages of tickets... you're telling me I either have to make dozens of different views (that I can only find by going out of the support system into admin center just to be brought back to support), or I will have to add dozens of clicks to my workflows when I'm looking through our main inbox? This is actually kind of insane, and I'm interested to know who is asking for this performance optimization.
This combined with losing the ability to sort by subject... these changes aren't just inconveniences that many of us can adapt to. They're deep inefficiencies that are going to add hours and hours of manual work and possibly a staffing cost as a result. I was truly hoping Admin Center was going to be the worst of it, but it was only the beginning.
PLEASE rethink the pagination changes. Pleeeease I am begging you!
Editing to add: we have processes that require our specialists to know who is on which page so there's no overlapping work.
In addition, how can I calculate how many tickets I have in my inbox if there's over 1k and I don't know how many pages there are? Will Zendesk be surfacing the actual number of tickets in a view over 1k, or will this remain at 1k, 1.5k, 2k, etc? If the latter, what are your suggestions for easily and quickly calculating the number of tickets in a view over 1k? Previously I could simply do "page number x 30."
Why would you remove the ability to sort by Subject, Requester, and Group. This is a feature that we use daily and is extremely helpful to our workflow?
We feel as tho we are now paying to lose functionality.
I understand the goal is to improve functionality, but improving functionality by reducing features isn't what I would consider an improvement.
Sorting by columns, jumping to pages, these are all essential features. Very often we use the jumping to pages just to determine criteria for a new view. Removing that ability hinders this effort.
Just over a month ago you were saying sort by requester will not be being removed? https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408826088730/comments/4487861997594
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