I am currently using version 99 of Sketch. Some of my colleagues use the most up to date version.
In our team we use big libraries for our design process. When we want to switch between colors or components during out process using the right tool menu, we stumble upon large menus with complicated groupings.
This is fine as we manage our own libraries however now the cascading menus triggered from the Symbol or Color selection makes our job even more complicated. The overlay of menus make it hard to navigate through the list.
A single slide of cursor makes me lose my track to the intended symbol/color. Sometimes we are back to the menu two steps above, sometimes we are back to the starting of the search. It becomes frustrating when you are doing large amount of changes.
We hope we are not the only one having this problem with this style of cascading menus. Hope this experience can be improved!
Hi @oes thanks for sharing this insight with us! Indeed, groupings in libraries can go several levels deep and the resulting menus a bit cumbersome to navigate. I do see your point and we’ve taken notice of this.
When you want to change existing symbols, the search field can help speed things up and not have to go through the whole groupings path:
For inserting new symbols or components, the Insert Window can help a lot. You can display it by pressing the letter C on your keyboard and search for symbols and components in the current document and in any installed libraries
These steps you suggested, we already utilize a lot but some changes unfortunately require the other route. We have settled with the “Replace with” feature and to the Insert Window mostly.
But unfortunately search sometimes isn’t the most efficient for us, as we use different libraries. To display the search that comes up for us, I’ll add a screen shot.
Thus finding the specific components through the cascading menus become the easier choice sometimes.
My teammate @yeb commented on the version as we took notice of this change of the cascading menus quite recently with updating versions. We did not have a similar issue a couple months prior, however the issue may not be version 99 specifically.
Thank you for taking a notice of the issue and trying to find solutions for us! Hope to hear news of the up coming things.
Hi @oes thank you so much for sharing this update. I’ve taken notice of these pain points so the team can evaluate how to improve them. I agree that searching and finding specific colors or symbols when using several libraries can be easier and faster.
I tested several Sketch versions, all the way back to version 86, but I cannot find a difference in how the menus are displayed, surely I’m missing something.
So far, I’ve found that cascading menus display left and right to avoid spreading too far and making navigation even harder, but the behavior is consistent. What am I missing? Take a look at the screenshot below:
Thank you for your exploration of our issue. It seems the behavior is consistent. I checked back to versions prior as well (back to v74 around when we started using the program seriously), which carry similar behaviour but has inconsistantcy with which way menus open. But this seems to be fixed in further versions to the behaviour you mentioned.
I am suspecting this menu behaviour became an issue for us recently due to the growth of our libraries and we started noticing it more as we moved things around.
It comes back to my first point that these are hard to navigate if you have a lot of submenus within your libraries. But I believe we already explored that in depthly. Thank you for taking this issue with your team!
@oes Thanks for the update. Indeed the current interaction with menus and submenus gets harder as your library grows and adds more groups → more submenus.
Please let us know if you run into any other issue or have any other feedback, it’s always reviewed and deeply appreciated!
