How could Xero improve the homepage?

I completely agree, this new page is super busy, noisy and distracting. More time wasting and not efficient use of my time at all.

the new layout is extremely confusing and cluttered as already raised from many users - what I have noticed over the year with your product is that you are constantly trying to change what is (was) already working well - most of the time changes and updates are detrimental to the user experience rather than a positive improvement - the homepage, for instance, as far as I am concerned, was perfectly fine. Recently you have also updated the layout of Xero XPM - same story there, the old version was better. Moving forward, you should give the option to users to stick with what they like - if a user do not like an upgrade, they should be given the possibility to stick to the old version. This way you would positively meet expectations of users who requires and expect a constantly evolving product and users who are happy with what they are currently using. The number of users willing to switch to the new version of the product would also provide you with an instant feedback on the upgrade.

The new homepage design is terrible. Who thought this looked good, it is messy, all information blends together. What happened to the KISS principle! Why do you continue to make us pay for this! Why don't you spend your time on things that we as your customers need, like being able to put accounts on hold! It appears you are more concerned with the way your program looks than how it functions.

I am in the camp of preferring the old layout, and the one thing that has me set this way was the loss of the line graphs for accounts. This simple visual presentation gives instant feedback to me on the trend for any given account, particularly important for day-to-day cashflow or credit accounts.

Hello Xero Team
How many votes do you need to stop this "new version" to go ahead? Do we need to find an alternative to Xero now?

Home page way too busy and noisy.

My sales person just advised that they can see the whole new homepage as a standard user, they can now see all our bank accounts & balances.
That will also mean that our purchasing person can see that & all the income & expenses which is absolutely not relevant to their role.
There needs to far more permission on/off toggle options for each user.
The new page should be for higher management ONLY.

Xero as an organisation really still doesn't understand their customer base! More changes that are poorly planned, created by non-users of the product it seems. Ugly, cluttered, and hinders work flow rather than improving it. Just look at all the comments - and we all know that many don't bother to complain, so the real number of unhappy customers is rather significant.

Has Xero really learnt nothing from the 'new invoicing' fiasco! Yet another pile of poorly designed layout changes forced upon loyal customers. As others have well summarised, the layout may look superficially 'pretty', but is cluttered, bloated, inconvenient, and adds nothing meaningful. It is clear that Xero no longer has any clue about real world data or user workflows.
Comments from Kelly to the effect of now 'having plans for exploring the possibility' of making changes that are necessary to make the update workable, are beyond a joke!! These changes are not something that have been forced upon Xero, they are of your own making, and if the product team can't see how poorly considered they are, then there is no hope.
After over 17 years as a loyal Xero customer and advocate, year-end can't come soon enough. We're in the process of moving to Odoo, and encourage others to consider doing similar.

this new homepage is a cluttered mess

such a jumble of info all together no definition between accounts

not for us

Unfortunately, I find the new homepage unusable. Some people may like the colour change, but I cannot look at the new colours for long. The Red especially. I assume Xero did not consider the correct colours to use, as red is one of the colours that can cause the most visual fatigue. So, with the widgets being crowded, incorrect colours, and everything being so large and garish, it has now created a privacy/confidentiality problem, which is a serious concern, as everyone in the office can easily see the figures on my screen. My workaround is that I have had to remove all widgets from my homepage except Tasks, as Tasks shows nothing important, and then I just click through menus until I find what I need, which defeats the purpose of having a homepage at all! Not practical, but saves the eye strain and headaches! The previous homepage was far easier on the eyes, more discreet, and more practical for daily use.

Hello,
This new layout looks great but also confusing, for now i can say i prefer the old one. But an improvement will be much better. I have a problem when i use the ctrl F to find something in the homepage, I need to use the exact very first word so the search engine will run, can't use the second or part of the word i need to find.
for example.. i have a bank account name "abc 123".
i can't type "123" in the search box, it'll show me no result. but when i type "abc", it works.

I wish this can be fixed.

There is too much white space. Dashboard needs to be a lot tighter, preferable one page.

I can't see how this is an improvement. I have 19 bank accounts to keep track of and could organise them more easily before. There is too much white space on each account 'tab' and not enough visual difference between them (or ways of adding differences) so it's hard to scan them. Please review this before making it mandatory.

There's quite a lot of feedback on this point now, to the point it's worth delaying any mandatory switch to the new homepage.

What needs to happen:

1. Delay any mandatory switch over to the new homepage while fixes and improvements are made.

2. Allow users to specify the number of columns: 2, 3 or 4 to their preference. Optionally have a "dynamic" option for people that do want to use this feature.

3. Fix the widget scrambling when moving between 2, 3 or 4 columns, and when customising/arranging widgets. For example, if we put all bank accounts in the left-most column, they should stay in the left-most column when arranging other widgets or switching from 3 to 4 column layout.

For the technical minded (or Xero developers): most of the layout fixes are fairly simple CSS adjustments. For those people that use browser-level add-ons and customisations, you can override the Xero site CSS to give you some better control (e.g. to fix the number of columns). Unfortunately, this isn't a solution we can give to our clients/users of Xero, and isn't really useful for people who don't know the technical implementation of this stuff. (If you are interested, you can check my other comments on a related post for the detail.)

Its so busy and impossible to customise. I 'read' the page in columns, but you've got some ridiculous left to right system going on. As fast as I'm moving widgets down the page another one pops into the gap meaning its all just a mess again. My client has over 30 bank accounts including Paypal etc and I need them all there. Let me leave gaps for a second or leave the tile where I put it!

The new homepage, I agree with comments below, looks very cluttered and if clients do their own Xero file very confusing, I much prefer banks lined up under each other easier to reconcile looks much neater and more organised.

How the current one shows is so much simpler to read and although I agree bills need attention it is important that providing invoicing to clients in a timely fashion is more important so creating a new invoice and being able to see what is in drafts, not approved etc can be actioned needs to be prominent at the top of the invoices owed to you widget. Please place New Invoice, drafts up the top and do not title it invoices owed to you just Invoicing Tab

I am finding this new home page ridiculously busy and hard to navigate. It was good to have the ability to put my clients bank accounts one side and other information the other side of the screen.
While it is nice to see some of the info you have added it is not necessary and totally do not want to see the ads bar along bottom!!!

You have made a great layout very challenging and frustrating!!

I like that this is scalable but the thing is that 4 columns wide is too much for me and this isn't supportive for my workflow. In addition to that I cant move the features where I want them, it automatically moves them along so I cant get them in the order I need, its worse than trying to sort and move apps on a phone, but more infuriating....

Whats worse, I cant make this work for me and to add to it you will force this on to us like new invoicing.