Homepage - "Narrow Mode" Option for Business Overview
I have a wide screen (normal width for a monitor, but wide compared to a tablet or laptop) which facilitates 4 widgets horizontally (the limit, after some testing).
The widgets take up the entire space horizontally, leaving no space either side, and feels cramped as a result. This is a break from a pretty long-standing web-design principle to which even the page I'm typing this suggestion into adheres (having about 10-15% margin/padding either side of your main content where space allows).
I'd love the option to cap the number of widget colums to 3 instead of 4 (keeping the width of the columns as they are). This would add half a widget's width to either side of the widgets area and make the space feel more focused.
The option could be a switch that appears when the user clicks customise.
Ultimately, I'd just like to be able to pull the content in from the screen edges.
Douglas Marken
shared this idea
Appreciate the feedback, Douglas and this would be good to get a sense of the interest from others around.
As you've noted the new Homepage is responsive and will auto adjust up to 4 widgets wide based on your device and computer and browsing zoom options.
We don't have any plans around enabling user based customisations to this layout but lets start by getting a gauge from community in this here 🙂
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Elliot Colbert
commented
I'm finally grappling with the new homepage, and I realize that one of the first things that put me off is that all my widgets were scrambled from the order I'm accustomed to seeing them in (even when scaling my browser window shape/zoom to my usual 2-column view).
I see that this is because the old layout arranges my widgets in "vertical" linear order when scaling from 1 to 2 columns (going top-to-bottom down the left column first), where the new layout follows a "horizontal" order in scaling from 1 to 2/3/4 columns (going left-to-right across the top row).
I always prefer to use the Xero homepage in a "2-column" aspect ratio, so the old behavior was perfect for me. (And even if I were to change my window size, the widget grid dynamically scaling from 2 to 3/4 columns in the new layout is still disadvantageous to me - suddenly none of my widgets are in the position where I expect them!)
My strongest recommendation is to abandon that new behavior, and revert to a 2-column max layout.
But if that's not in the cards, then it would still be easier for users to switching to the new homepage if their initial 2-column view reflected the layout that they're used to on the old homepage (by re-sorting their widgets from the "vertical" to "horizontal" order).
Thanks for considering!