Spaces - User specific favorite space

[kobelb]

Updated description, March 2023

Spaces are a great way to organize your content, but they also create a barrier to Getting Work Done. Every time you login, you're presented with the Space Selector Screen, which requires you to make a decision about which space to enter. If you're in a large organization with a large number of Spaces, then this can become a time consuming part of your flow, and interrupt your work.

With the introduction of user profiles, we have the ability to remember information about individual users. We should use this to our advantage. I see a couple of different approaches:

A. Allow users to select their preferred/favorite space.

This provides the most flexibility, but requires curation by each user. This also requires additional engineering effort to design the management flow.

B. [Recommended approach] Remember the last space each user entered, and use that for subsequent logins.

This option allows us to provide a more intelligent experience, without requiring anything from the end user. While it is less flexible then a configurable option, it will provide immediate benefit to all users. We can always decide to add a user preference on top of this behavior in the future.

Original issue description, August 2018

Once we are able to store user settings/defaults, we'd like to allow users to choose their favorite space so that they're always logged into their favorite space when first visiting Kibana.

[kobelb]

This is blocked by #17888

[jbyroads]

It looks like this was added to a project that was closed, and no work was done on this issue. If there is an update to this enhancement request can somebody provide it?

I came to this issue as a result of trying to set a default space, so +1 for the enhancement request.

[legrego]

@jbyroads this is still something we want to do, but it is blocked on #17888

[sorenlouv]

Instead of waiting for #17888 could this be stored in locale storage? I'm okay with it not persisting across devices but at least having the same device remember my setting would be great.

[legrego]

Instead of waiting for #17888 could this be stored in locale storage? I'm okay with it not persisting across devices but at least having the same device remember my setting would be great.

We explored something similar in the past, and ended up deciding against an approach like this: #19417 (comment)

The good news is that user-specific settings are on the horizon. The security and platform teams are going to dive into this in the very near future.

[sorenlouv]

We explored something similar in the past, and ended up deciding against an approach like this:

I agree with everything in that comment. Although this line stands out 2.5 years later:

User preferences is a really important feature to sort out sooner rather than later

("sooner" can of course be relative 😄)

The good news is that user-specific settings are on the horizon. The security and platform teams are going to dive into this in the very near future.

Awesome! I realise things like this is nice-to-have and not top priority but good to hear it's on the near-term roadmap

[GoodMirek]

Our company is ElasticCloud customer and we really miss this feature.

[sorenlouv]

It's late 2022 and I'd like to point out an important Elastic principle "Progress, SIMPLE Perfection"

If we had merged #19417 4.5 years ago we would have shipped something valuable to users. Instead we opted to pause the effort in favour of the perfect solution that may never materialize.

This is just a single example of a general problem I've seen. I hope we can do better in the future.

[IanLee1521]

It's early 2024 now, and another flavor of this, perhaps a separate request, is to allow per-user default routes / home pages generally. E.g. some users in one team might want to land on a particular overview page that is particular to their efforts. See also #17888 (comment) for related discussion about this feature.

[dgieselaar]

@legrego I don't get this argument (I know it's not yours) at all (maybe I'm missing something terribly obvious):

Specifically, this proposed feature not only leaks the existence of space ids, it implicitly leaks that one person or set of people has access to that space as well. If I see Sally log out of Kibana and walk away from some shared computer, I can now not only learn of a space I might not have access to, but I can learn that Sally does have access to it. That's doubly bad.

Cookies are browser-specific. So is URL history. Do we consider URL history - which will "expose" space ids as well - a security leak too?

[everythings-gonna-be-alright]

The lack of this option is annoying. These extra clicks steal time. Maybe someone already has a workaround in 2024?

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/appex-sharedux (Team:SharedUX)

[petrklapka]

There is some additional complexity to this and it ties into upcoming default route work and solution preferences for side nav. We'll punt to PM to review this and prioritize as desired.

[kevinsweet]

Seems like a nice feature. On the flip side, it's one click per session.
There are opportunities to more meaningfully improve our experience at the moment but we'll keep this in mind as we visit 'spaces' design at large.

[IanLee1521]

@kevinsweet - I get not prioritizing this now, and having it as a lower priority, but it seems like closing as "complete" isn't quite the right answer... Did it move to another tracking place?

[kevinsweet]

#17888