Feedback following new Guide interface release

As a possible workaround to your issue with the table buttons - if you click the new gear icon in the upper right to expand the panel, then click "Article Settings" in the lower right, that will temporarily remove the bar at the bottom. Then click "Cancel" to bring back the Save button when needed.

That said, I fully agree with all of these issues.

• This new bar at the bottom doesn't seem fully thought through. It sacrifices precious vertical space even though there is tons of space on the side for these buttons. And there's no reason for it to ever obstruct the editor tools, like in your screenshot.
• I don't understand why the View/Preview button is all the way over on the left side, instead of next to the other buttons.
• And as you said, the Save button being enabled when no changes are detected is a step backwards - that was a useful indicator of whether or not I had made changes to an article.
• The Gear icon now lets you collapse the Article Settings pane. But that doesn't actually make the editing space any wider, so there's no real benefit to collapsing it. It would be great if the article body could match the same width as the live article, so things like image size or table width can be judged more easily without having to save and look at the preview.

The reasoning behind this update is not clear at all. Some communication from Zendesk on this change would be helpful.

Not sure at all why you wouldn't just have these buttons in the side bar like they were.  Though having a quick View button is nice, it's hard to notice being so far in the other corner from the others.  Again, all of that could've been in the existing side bar together.  Also agree that it's weird the Save button stays blue instead of being disabled when there are no changes to be made. And since the button is now all the way at the bottom of the browser window, it's hard to notice the message at the top of the window that there are no changes to be saved.  Overall just strange design choices IMO.

Additionally, if you have just opened the article, or viewed revision history and gone back to the page, the View button on the left is covered up a bit by the Help/Support bubble.

Hi All, 

Thank you so much for all your feedback and a great discussion in this thread. I'll try to address some of the issues raised here:

• tables controls obscured by the footer and button obscured by a widget - these are obvious bugs, thank you again for pointing them out to us, we are already working on the fixes
• always enabled Save button - this change is fully intentional, according to the accessibility literature disabled buttons are providing suboptimal experience for the customers who use screenreaders and keyboard navigation. In Zendesk we strive to make our product accessible for everyone.

When it comes to the issues with a lot of empty space and lack of communication about the changes.... I wonder if you had a chance to check this series of articles. It explains that the editor UI uplift is a project we will be working on throughout the whole next year and touches upon the reasoning for the changes. It also introduces the upcoming changes in advance, so you can be always prepared for them. We will be adding more content to it (with more changes) throughout next year, so it might be good to bookmark it :) 

Hi Katarzyna, 

Thank you for your response. I completely understand accessibility improvements. But they don't need to come at the expense of general UX. Knowing if the Saved button has been clicked already before clicking it is very useful information that users no longer have.