Improving HubSpot's Main Navigation | HubSpot Admins HUG | October 7, 2022

We can share this afterward. Perfect. Welcome, everybody, to what I guess is maybe the first official meeting of the HubSpot admin hug, even though it's like the fourth or fifth one at this point. Months ago, I had the idea of launching this, and I reached out to the product team and asked if anyone had a great idea of things HubSpot admins might be interested in. And Anthony suggested the new nav. And boy, howdy, was he right. There were more than 400 and more than 500 people registered for this event, and hopefully all of you who are here have had a chance to see the new NAV try it out. We're very excited to get your thoughts and talk a bit more about it. So there is certainly some housekeeping stuff I could do for this hug, but I'll save that for the end. I want to make sure Anthony gets through everything he wants to talk about, and then as we have time, I will talk a bit about where we're headed with this group. But, Anthony, go ahead and take it away.

All right, I'm going to try this screen share business and see if. Okay, you know what? I'm going to share my entire screen. There's nothing here that. Well, if it'll let me. Okay. All right. No, I have nothing to hide. I just probably have to clean this up a little bit. All right. I don't know. Can you all see this? Can somebody confirm? Because unlike Zoom, I can't see anything.

Right. I will monitor the chat. Because this is a web app, I think it is maybe impossible for you to do both, but that's what I'm here for.

That's right.

So you just go, and if anything crazy happens in the chat, I'll let you know. Everyone. I've also turned on the Q and A function, so if you have questions you want to make sure we get to at the end, go ahead and drop them in there. I'll be watching.

Awesome. Well, thank you, Kyle, for inviting me and giving me the space to do a little presentation on this redesign. Thanks to all of you that registered and have already been engaging with the new navigation and providing lots of comments and feedback around it. It's been extremely helpful to me and the whole team, and we're just grateful to all of you for being such fabulous customers and so engaged. So, as Kyle already said, my name is Anthony Shenouda. I'm a research lead here at HubSpot. I work, obviously, with the team that works on global navigation, but that also includes the notifications component of the platform as well as the global search component. But I'm not just a research I am a father and a husband. I'm a backpacker and a hiker. These are my two boys on the right here, Macarius and Seraphim. These are photos from a recent trip to Wyoming, where we spent just over a week camping, hiking, backpacking. It was great. We live in California, but I also have an academic background, so I have a PhD in cultural anthropology and Middle Eastern studies, a master's degree in Latin American Studies. I've traveled around a good part of the planet. So all of that I hope I bring to bear on the work that I currently do as a researcher. So let's push on. I want to present a little bit about the work we're doing on the navigation. So I'm going to give you a little bit of a window onto the process, like how we're thinking about things, some of the logics behind the changes we're making, because I know that can really help folks understand what we're up to here and why we're doing the things. I will present to you a vision of sorts around the new or the redesigned navigation. I will present to you the proposal for how that navigation is being structured. I'll give you a demonstration of it. Again, I know many of you have spent time in it and have have had a chance to see it, but many of you have not. So I will show you what it actually looks like and how it works. I will present to you a little bit on the responses that we've been receiving around and then talk about our ongoing work with regard to all right, so here's the vision as we see it. The redesign of the HubSpot Navigation is meant to create an efficient and streamlined workflow for our customers. And efficiency as we see it, is not simply about reducing clicks. That's often the way I think clicks is the language that's used to talk about efficiency, but it's not really just about clicks, but it's about providing a logical organizational structure and if you will, rewards or signposts as one moves from one place to another. In other words, I firmly believe, and I think the team agrees with me, that people should always know where they are and where they're going when it comes to navigating. And so to that end, the vision for the navigation is that it will help Those who use HubSpot come to recognize that those top level menus, those people primary menus at the top of the platform represent workspaces rather than repositories of links. And what I mean by that is we've tended to design HubSpot navigation around the hub, so marketing hub, sales hub, service hub, et cetera. And we're now thinking of it differently that rather than having a hub oriented navigation, we really want to have more of a workflow oriented navigation. So here are the logics of this proposal. So the information architecture, the way things are organized and by the way, this is a little bit old, so it's not reflecting exactly where things are at the moment, but it's fairly accurate. But at any rate it's not so much the placement of items that I'm interested in at the moment, but just to reflect, reveal to you the logics of how we're thinking about this. So you'll notice that we have, if you think about this, we have three sort of buckets of information if you will. The first one on the left hand side here is one to one customer communication. In the middle we've got customer attraction and engagement, hence marketing website components. And then we've got more of that internal optimization stuff. So this is not always customer facing. Obviously things like templates and snippets and meetings. These are all meant to engage with customers in some way, but it's still like an internal way of organizing things in order to reach out to customers and engage with them. Customers and clients. Right. So basically we've got from direct customer interaction to little to no customer interaction, more or less high frequency tasks on the left here to lower frequency tasks where for example meetings, you might set up a couple of different meetings. You leave it alone for a while before you, you go back and make any adjustments to that. So hopefully that makes at least some sense. The logics here. And now I just want to show you what this looks like. So I'm going to just log into my own portal here and I hope everybody can see this. Well, I tried to make it to sort of zoom in but you'll see this is what I was talking about. Kyle, is it looking okay?

Yeah, it looks good.

Okay, great. It's so weird to be talking and not seeing other people.

Feel like you're just in the board.

It's like I'm just talking to myself. So you'll see these top level primary menu items, as I mentioned, other components, this plus new button, global search is now more prominent. And then the utility, what we call the utility layer here you'll find help marketplace, your settings, cog, notifications and of course your dropdown sort of profile menu here. Let's start with plus new. For those of you that haven't played around with this, you might wonder what this is. Well, this is a way for you to quickly be able to do things that you might want to do from wherever you happen to be on the platform. So if you need to create a quote, you click there and it will take you to the quote page. You can go through the process and do that. Now you'll notice that I was on when I did this, and I clicked in here and it took me away. So, like, if I create company, you're gonna notice that now it's taking me to the company's page. This is something that we're working on now. And the ideal for us is that what will happen is you don't leave the page that you're on. So if you're on deals, you're still gonna see deals in this area here. But. But this little menu slides out. You can create the company. Hit create when you're finished, and then get back to what you were working on. That's the ideal way that we want plus New to be working. You'll also notice that we've designed it so that you'll have the most recent creations, if you will, that you've engaged will show up. Here we are in Q4 right now. For the rest of this year, this is one of the things we'll be working on, is to redo this so that it's a little bit clearer and cleaner and responsive to the way folks might want to see this. And you can search for things. This is a pretty long list of stuff. So if you know that you want to create a template, you can just start typing that in here and it'll show up for you. So that's plus new in terms of.

Before you move on, we've got a couple questions and things here in general, people love plus new. It seems like they're excited about it. It's a handy thing. We have some questions around the inclusion of custom objects here. Is that a thing that will ever be?

Yeah, so that's a great question. It's come up a lot that from an engineering standpoint, that's a heavier lift because custom objects are custom. They're not things that already that HubSpot has created. And so I can see a world where we would eventually make that a possibility. At present it's not, but I could see that in sort of future iterations of this. But again, from an engineering standpoint, it's a bit of a heavier lift here. So we kind of to Be very transparent and honest. We want to get this thing right with the things that we already have built in HubSpot before we would make that next move to custom objects. So I'm not saying no, it won't happen, but I think what I am saying is please be patient. Yeah, that makes sense when it comes to that.

A couple other people are saying that even with the search, the list of things you can create in plus new is pretty long and just some suggestions, ideas from people or maybe have it be relevant to the page you're on or float those ones to the top or some way of filtering or sorting. Just seems like they love. People love that this plus new thing puts everything in one place, but it also makes you realize just how many things you can create enough stuff.

Yes, totally fair. Yeah, that's a very, very fair and good bit of feedback. I appreciate that. And I have heard that feedback before. Again, this is a project we're taking on in this quarter, so I imagine we'll really be refining and sort of cleaning this up. I will say that if we reduce this to the things that you can do for the page that you're on, then it becomes less useful potentially because sometimes people will be somewhere and want maybe in tickets and want to create a particular contact or whatever without having to leave that page. Think we want to be very careful about that piece of it, but you're.

Getting lots of agrees on that one.

Okay, cool.

People are aligned with.

Yeah, we want to make this. Basically we want to make this a pretty universal feature. But I agree it is a long list and we need to really sort through and figure out how to create some way of filtering it or organizing it so that it. It's a little bit more intuitive and easy and quick to use. So we will be working on that definitely in the coming months.

Yeah.

Anything else before I push on here?

Yeah, some generally related thoughts here. People like the recent ones, some people are speculating maybe an ability to pin things to the top or sort of like permissioning saying like we don't want to allow quotes, for example, to be created here. We want them to be created only from a deal or Anyway, certainly there are a lot of options. But I hear what you're saying, that this is an entirely new infrastructure inside of HubSpot and so getting that initial piece right will build sort of the groundwork for us to be able to do more feature requests in the future.

Yeah, and I will say for those of you that are not already aware, we do a ton of research with our customers. So we don't just create things and throw them out into the world. We will be taking this feedback and certainly once we start to do some new designing around the user interface here, we'll be reaching out to folks and getting feedback on what's working and what isn't. With that, really appreciate this feedback.

I think you can go ahead and move, move forward. If I missed anyone's questions, drop them in the Q and A and we'll circle back to them at the, at the end.

Yeah, great. So just a couple of other things. I'm not going to go through this entire thing because that would just take way too much time. But, you know, you hopefully get a sense of the organization as I talked about earlier. So we've got these different sort of buckets, if you will. We've made sure that the sidebar here can be collapsed because sometimes one needs that extra space. And obviously it depends on the size of your computer screen. But also, you know, there are certain pages in HubSpot where you need a little more real estate, so to speak. So we've, we've made sure to include that. We are. Now I will show you, if I click on marketing, it's going to default to the campaigns page. Now, I know that many of you already know this. Some of you probably do not. So you're probably, you might be looking at this and thinking, well, you know, I don't want to go to campaigns. I use lists and that's the only thing I'm ever going to use in marketing. And some of you are probably already thinking, why is lists in marketing? It's a big question. And we're working with the Marketing Hub folks to sort through that. But at any rate, we have come up with some designs and we'll begin working on implementing one of them where you can default a page here. So if I default list, you know, let me show you. Let's do this. Actually, I don't know if this is going to allow me to default this. So CRM by default goes to Contact. But if I want, you know, say I'm a service support rep, I go into tickets all the time. That's the page I'd really like to land on. Most of the time when I'm in this menu, click the three dots here, set as default, I get a banner that confirms that it's been set. Now if I navigate somewhere else, I go to Marketing, for example, I can default whatever I want here. Same with all these other menus. Now I go back to CRM. It should open up on tickets right away. That can be changed. We're thinking through whether this should be an admin level thing, an individual user level thing, both. Again, these are sort of open conversations for us. We certainly would like to give admins the ability and managers the ability to set these defaults for their teams. And we're also considering a pinning option where you could maybe pin two or three other menus here and they'd all show up at the top. So you can still have the default, but you also have a couple of others that are at the top that you frequent. So these are some of the things we're thinking about with regard to. To the navigation here.

You're getting lots of love over these ideas.

All right. Awesome. That, that's good. I mean, again, I can't see a thing, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

In this weird void. And that. That makes me happy.

Seems like there's a general sense of. It did feel like maybe a. Some extra clicks or, you know, having to click on one thing and wait for it to load and then click on the. But to be able to, to choose a default and to be able to pin things to the top, I think is getting at the. The heart of people concerns there.

Yeah. And I will remind folks that even with the current navigation and this is why the click thing is interesting because I think there's, there's part of it is just like habit and part of it is perception. But you're still having to double click into everything. Right. So I click into marketing. I still have a second click to get to where I want to go. It might be a little bit faster for sure, but you have less of that load time. But there still is that double click going on here. At any rate, I would like to move back to the presentation and say a few more things and give all of you an opportunity to ask more questions. Feedback. So I don't know if you're going to be able to hear sound or not. I hope that you will.

I don't either.

We're gonna find out. But I'm gonna play this clip and just tell me, Kyle, if the sound is working or not.

I'm not hearing anything.

No. Okay. I'm gonna have to do voiceover. I'll tell you what people are saying. They're saying it looks clean, it looks clean. I mean this is like six, seven people this, this video responding to this new navigation. And one of the things that came up repeatedly was it looks clean, it looks clean. This is clean. So I won't play the rest of it, because it seems useless if you can't hear it. But that was some of the commentary that we got. Now, I want to sort of think a little bit about what that means. There's certainly an aesthetic component to it, and I think that's a big part of the response. The cleanliness is about the aesthetics of it, and that's great. That's important. We want good aesthetics. We want things to look good, to be beautiful. So that's a big plus. But there's more. The way I think of it is if it's clean, it ain't dirty. So we better talk about dirt and what that actually means in terms of navigation on the HubSpot platform. Now, using my background as a cultural anthropologist to draw on a very famous British anthropologist, Mary Douglas, who defined as matter that is out of place. And this is such a wonderful definition of dirt, right? And even this little image that somebody created here is. Is so. Is perfect for this, right? Like, think about this plant, right? When this dirt, literal dirt, is in the planter, in the pot here, it's not out of place. And I don't know that anybody would think of it as dirty per se, because it's. It's where it belongs. But once it comes out and it's on the floor, now we're talking about something that is dirty. Obviously these things are going to vary culturally and so on, But I. Hopefully you get the point, right? My socks, even if they're clean, that is, they've just been washed, if they're on the bedroom floor, I might think of that as dirt, because the sock doesn't belong there. It's matter out of place. The room is now dirty. But when the socks are put in the drawer where I think they ought to be, then there's a kind of cleanliness there. And this, in many ways, I think, reflects part of our vision here, that we want things to be in the right place, and that is part of the cleanliness of a good information architecture on the HubSpot platform. Now, I want to talk about. I guess I'll pause here. Are there any thoughts or questions about.

People love your dirt analogy. They love it.

Well, you can thank Mary Douglas for that. And I will admit that I think that things are still a little bit dirty on the platform, But I will tell you that we're hard at work thinking through some of that dirt and how to clean it up, so I'm gonna stick with the metaphor. But I do want to be clear that I think we still have a fair amount of Work to do here, here. So let's talk about a couple of other quick things here. Discoverability. What do I mean by this? What I mean, this is not findability. This is not the ability to find things, right? So maybe you are a service rep and you use tasks and you use tickets a lot and those are easy or they're difficult to find. That's a findability question. Discoverability is really more about encountering things that you weren't aware of before, but doing so in a way where there's a logic to it. So what do I mean by that? Think about when you go to the library, right? You might have a particular book that you're looking for. So you look up where the book is on the shelves and hopefully people are still doing this and it's not all totally digital. You walk over to the bookshelf and you find the book that you're looking for. But you know what? Around that book are a bunch of other books on the same theme. And very often you're going to find other books that are really relevant and important to you. Sometimes they might end up being even more important or relevant to the work you're doing than the original book that you sought out. And I can say this as somebody who's been engaged for years and all sorts of research that I had that experience innumerable times. And so discoverability for us is important in HubSpot. One of the things that we found in our research is that dropdown menus are not good for discoverability. Why? Because, and this is not just HubSpot research, but just research in general on this sort of dropdown menu. This, these things kind of force you to make a decision pretty quickly. And so you go in here now you might know that you want templates. So you go in and you tap templates and you're in templates and doing your work. And that's that you don't even notice these other things potentially, right? And indeed I think some of the most impactful things in our lives. So I'm speaking very broadly here, whether they're positive or negative are often those things that exert influence on us silently, they're, they're quiet kinds of influencers and drop down menus do that again, research has shown, and I think is convincingly showing that dropdowns tend to demand a quick response. So you click into it, you find what you're looking for, think you're looking for, you click on that and you're out. So discoverability becomes low. Because if I come into conversations and I just click into templates. I may not be noticing these other features here, and I may not even know what they are, what they do, but I and that's part of why I don't bother with them with the persistent sidebar is that discoverability is much higher because again, I might know that I want to be in tasks and so that's where I go. However, these things are right there in front of me the whole time. There's a chance that I might click into some other things that I don't use on a regular basis to see what they are, how they work. I just might discover a tool that actually helps me work better. We've already been seeing that with some of our customers. This video I won't bother playing since the sound isn't working, unfortunately, but it's okay. But I will again just explain what Maddie talks about here. In an interview I conducted with her around the persistent menu is she voluntarily said to me that seeing all of this stuff here means that she might actually start clicking around and checking things out. Now, I know from an admin or a manager perspective you might not want your team doing that. Permissions is there to help avoid some of that. But there are instances where people are finding tools that actually do help them work better, and we want to make sure that that is available to them. So in a sense, the opportunity for us here is to organize tools, as I mentioned earlier, with a kind of web workspace vision in mind and to allow more of our customers to learn about how various tools can work together to help them more easily and efficiently accomplish tasks. Now, I again will admit I don't think that work is finished or complete, and perhaps it never will be. But it's certainly a driving vision and force behind what we're up to. So there are a couple of pros. Well, more than a couple of pros and cons. And all of this with the science. Again, this is something we think about now, the sidebar menu keeps submenus visible. I just spoke to that that discoverability is opened up in a way that drop downs don't allow. And sorry, that's this number two pros. The first one is about movement. So you know, we're trying to group tools together that people use together, so to speak. So you might want to have deals, contacts, companies in the same space. That's certainly now the case. And the new CRM menu so one can easily move across these within that one workspace, so to speak. Again, discoverability is opened up. Our hope, I think we're beginning to get closer to this. We may still have some work to do here, but the new top level menus require less memorization of where tools are located. At least that's what we've been hearing from many customers. Again, I know it's not perfect, but we're really trying to get that as good as we can. And then having less top level menus provides a cleaner aesthetic and potentially less cognitive load. So not having to think of all of these menus, where am I going to find things? I'll tell you right now. I use meetings all the time to set up interviews with customers and I struggle to find it every single time because for some reason in my mind, meetings and conversations seem to go well together. So I'm always clicking in that menu and that doesn't work. And then I'm clicking into contacts and that doesn't work. And I finally remember that, oh, it's in sales. That's where I have to go. These are the kinds of things that we want to try to avoid as much as possible. Having less of that cognitive load and that sense of, well, how do I interpret what this menu means and what might be underneath some of the cons, we have to recognize this. The sidebar does not allow for a quick view of sub menus. And I think that's been a pretty big complaint here. That sneak peek of the menus can be really valuable and, and important. Clicking into top level menu leads to a specific page, so that may not be desirable. That's the landing page default thing that we, that I spoke to. So we are already addressing that and it will be resolved. We found the collapsibility of the sidebar sometimes isn't obvious to many people. So that is something we want to, to try to work on because we want to make sure that people know that they have that extra space if they need it. And then of course, some tools are either difficult to find or they seem misplaced. So if I'm struggling with meetings and sales, I think now it's falling under that library menu and it's still a struggle for a lot of people. So I'm not sure we fully resolved that, but these are some of the things that we think about. Lists has come up a lot. It's in marketing and the new navigation. A lot of sales and other folks are using lists, so it's hard to make that link of lists and marketing. So again, one of the things we're trying to sort through. This is the last thing I want to talk about here. Which is just our ongoing work. What we're up to these days, and I've mentioned some, but we continue to see customer feedback. Those of you that have opted into the new navigation, you are also invited to a Slack workspace. And thanks to all of you that have been in that space and are providing a ton of great feedback. One of the beautiful things to me about it is you will get people like HubSpot clients, or HubSpot customers, rather, are sometimes helping each other out and communicating with each other and sort of in some instances even debating one another about where things should be. I find that really fruitful and useful. So thanks to all of you that are doing that. But we are collecting good qualitative feedback that way. We're certainly working with our internal teams on what their visions are for certain tools and pages and where they think they belong and so on. A lot of what you're seeing is not 100% on the navigation team. This is a collaborative effort. We're certainly sorting out bugs. They're coming up all the time. And we're constantly trying to work through that, cleaning things up. Remember Mary Douglas and her definition of dirt? That's something that we're doing. And we're iterating, we're thinking, we're iterating, iterating some more, thinking some more. So lots going on sort of on our end in terms of this redesign. And finally, I'm going to end with one of the things we talk a lot about at HubSpot is creating a crafted, not cobbled platform. And that, in my mind means that it needs to be dynamic, but it also means that change is going to happen. Now, most of us resist change when it happens because it's no longer familiar. We're faced with something that isn't familiar. But if something will be crafted and it will be dynamic, then it will change. And I can't help but reference Pink Floyd here and ask that question. Did they get you to trade cold comfort for change? We don't want our customers to. To embrace a kind of cold comfort simply because change can be a challenge and difficult at times. That's where we're at. This is what we're up to. A thousand thank yous. These are the languages that I can survive in the world with. So 1000 thank yous to Kyle and to all of you. And now if there are any questions. Any more questions?

Yeah. If you want to stop sharing your screen, you'll actually be able to see what's happening in the chat here. It's very Much like what you described of the Slack space. People are debating with each other, they're connecting with each other, they're helping each other. So one thing I wanted to call out a theme so something I learned that I did not know. A lot of folks here in this meeting love to go through the. The current nav, the old nav, and open things in new tabs. So they'll just open a whole bunch of different HubSpot.

I've seen it a thousand times.

Yeah, that's a bit harder in the new one because. Yeah, you just gotta. Anyway, so that's one bit of feedback. Sounds like you're familiar with. I don't know it. Was there anything else in it? There seems to be kind of a general question that we've gotten off in this long debate about the value of the Inbox, which is not what I expected, but I think underlying that is how is your team making decisions about what gets like prime time location in the nav? Like is that usage data or is it. How do you prioritize the things?

Yeah. So in terms of where. Okay, maybe I should start with this. Why is Inbox even there? Maybe that's a question people. It seems to be and I look, I think a lot of you know that Service Hub doesn't get as much love as it should in HubSpot. Right. There's a whole history to this. Right. In a platform that's sort of designed around marketing, eventually sales and service is introduced and it's sort of. It sits on the back burner so often. Right. The Service Hub team is hard at work to making those tools much more robust and to really like providing a more robust service component to HubSpot and Inbox is effectively that space. They're actually working on it now that eventually that it will be much more robust than it currently is and even a name change will likely happen. So that's it. It needs its space. Right. We've deprecated the service menu in lieu of having this inbox space for Service Hub folks. And why is it the first thing that you see? If you're sort of a left to right reader, then you're going to see this on the left hand side immediately. And I know that bothers a lot of people that never even touch it and don't care about it, but it does have to do with that logic that I shared earlier of one to one communication with customers. That's where chats are happening, emailing, lots of other things in that space. Moving from there to the right where you're having more internal optimization work going on. Is there work to be done here? Probably. But again, this is not a decision that navigation can just make. In a sense. We're working with a lot of teams to sort through this and make sure somehow everybody is happy. And whenever you're trying to make everybody happy, it doesn't work and somebody's not going to be happy. And I'm sure you can all very much appreciate the challenge there.

Yeah. Okay, friends, if there's anything else in the chat that I have failed to surface to Anthony, please drop it in the Q and A. I'm moving over to that tab now. There are lots of questions. Anthony. People are concerned. Even folks that you have ungated, they are worried if they turn it on for themselves, it'll be turned on for their whole portal. They are just wanting to make sure they don't kind of pull the rug out from under their whole team by opting into this.

Yes, good. That's a great question, and I'm glad somebody asked it because I honestly wouldn't have thought. Thought to address it. The way I'm ungating people is with your personal id. You probably don't even know what your personal ID is, but I do. And so I'm able to find it. And I've ungated folks that have requested have been ungated just for yourself, so you can opt in and out as often as you please. It will not impact the entire portal, so you don't have to worry about that. The only time portals have been ungated to the new nav experience is when people have explicitly asked me to do that. So some people sent me their hub IDs and so on, and I actually still only ungated them individually in those cases. Some people responded and said, can you just open the entire portal? Some people have sandbox portals they're using, so that's a space to just play around and. And they've wanted that entire portal open. But for the majority of you, if you haven't explicitly asked me to ungate a portal, it's just you as an individual. So you absolutely don't have to worry about your colleagues suddenly coming into a new experience and wondering what's happening.

Got it. That's great. And then people are also asking about being able to turn it, opt in and opt out.

Yeah. So as often as you please. I know from some people that language is a little bit weird. You feel like if you opt out, that's it. You'll never be able to go back. That's actually not the case. So you will continue to see the option in your profile dropdown to opt in if you have opted out. I know many of you are working with clients and doing training and so on and so you obviously need to go back to the current navigation to work with them. So don't worry about that. Opt out. Do the work you need to do. If you want to opt in, do it. You want to do it a thousand times a day, no problem.

Maybe don't.

I mean, yeah, that's probably a pain, but you can do that if you want.

There are also some people asking how how to join the beta and mentioning it's not in the beta management yet. Just to be clear, this is not an open beta yet.

You all got no it is private, right?

So the only way for you to get access if you haven't already, is to reach out to me or Anthony's the one who will do it. We'll turn it on for you and then you, you will be able to.

Opt yourself in and out. Yeah. So send an email to me a my the my the initial of my first name, last name. So a S H E N o d a HubSpot.com tell me that you'd like to be ungated and I'll do it. It is still a private beta. We haven't rolled this out to a General Population of HubSpot HubSpot customers and users yet.

Do you, do you have a sense of when that will happen? Do you have even rough.

Not until the new year. I think that that utility layer that I, you know, the settings, cog and all of that, that will roll out before the end of the year. That's not a huge change. In fact, I suspect a lot of people won't even notice a big change there and it won't be until the new year that we slowly start rolling this out. And the way that we plan to do it is to effectively ungate small groups at a time, see how things are going, you know, make sure we've got people sort of opted in for a certain period of time and like a certain percentage of the people that have been ungated are opting in and staying in and then we would sort of continue to open it up further. So it's a pretty slow going process, but we're doing that because we want to make sure people can adapt, little kinks are ironed out and so on before it becomes absolutely the new nav. There's a point at which new customers would just immediately kind of step into that new nav experience. I don't remember the timeline for that off the top of my head, but obviously that will happen before the current HubSpot customers would be sort of forced into that experience.

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, I've been around long and around long enough to remember last time the nav changed. In HubSpot, we give a very long period of letting people often, because we recognize this is a pretty fundamental change to the way you interact with. We're not going to surprise you with it. There are lots of questions and requests about just being able to reorder things, rename things, add custom things. People want customizable menu options, basically. Is that a thing you're thinking about?

Well, I think it's a thing we have to always be thinking about because customers are always asking about it. Excuse me, I want to say this. I want to be very transparent and some of you have sort of communicated with me individually, and so you've heard me say this. We're really slow about the customization thing at HubSpot in general. And the reason for that is we really do not want people to customize themselves into a bad experience. And I think Kyle can tell you, as somebody who sort of teaches HubSpot things, if things are radically customizable, it actually makes his job much harder because he doesn't know where you put things, how you've organized things. And so it actually makes that sort of training much more difficult to do. Now, these are not excuses for not customizing, but I think what I am saying is we want to be careful about how we do that. We want to be very thoughtful and very intentional about customization, which means it will be slow. I don't think it's not going to happen, but I think that it will be a slow process because we want to make sure that when we're introducing the ability to customize things, we're doing it in a thoughtful and intentional way that actually benefits all of you as customers and isn't a sort of free for all because that can be very, very messy. And there are lots of examples of the messy things and examples of the more opinionated things. And we're all going to sort of disagree on some of that. But if you think about Apple, you get some customization, but not a ton of, you know, some people love that, some hate it. I, you know, that's kind of a model for some of us at HubSpot of, you know, how is there a sweet spot for, for that? It's a constant conversation and debate, but that's that's where we're at. So I'm being totally honest and transparent with all of you about this, or at least I hope that I am.

Yeah, yeah. And those of you who have been with HubSpot for a while, you've. You've seen this journey. Right. There's a long time where custom objects was a thing we just didn't do, and now we do. Right. And this year we've leaned in heavily to letting you customize how records look and those sorts of things. HubSpot isn't an opinionated platform. HubSpot is a company. We believe there are right and wrong ways to do business. And we want to build a platform that will help you do it the right way and that is easy to learn and understand. But we recognize that sophisticated companies have unique needs. And so finding that balance, like Anthony is saying, is it's an ongoing battle.

Yeah. And I think we're gonna get there, but I think we just can't be too anxious about that. I think patience is truly a virtue here and it will pay off. I very strongly believe that. But it can be irritating in the meantime. I get that. But I think again, we really want to do this in a thoughtful way so that, so that people aren't sort of customizing themselves into, like I said, a bad experience or just otherwise painful experience that then becomes hard to get out of.

Yeah, yeah. So, going on to some other questions. There. There are a fair number of questions around permissions. I know in the current nav, you know, as things get turned on and off, they disappear or added from menu items. Will that, will this new nav also be responsive to permissioning in that same way?

I. You know what? I don't, I have to admit, I actually don't know. Like, I kind of hate to admit that, but I'm not 100% sure. I think that it will. And I know obviously permissioning isn't going away. If anything, it's becoming more robust and, and that is a space where I think there is in a sense, more customizability, if you will, in the sense that you can sort of turn on and off things for certain teams. I actually don't know how the new NAV will be responding to that. I'll just have to ask other folks on the team, to be honest with you. But I just don't know.

Yeah. And then just a note for you, there are a few people who would really like to have some sort of. Even if there are drop down menus, if there was some sort of hover text to help them understand what's in the different menus. A couple people are into hover responsiveness. Just wanted to mention that to you.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't think I don't have a lot to say in response to that. I think like definitely we know people, there are a lot of people that really like that. I think we are, we're obviously moving away from it. Is there a future where something like that can be introduced? Maybe, but I, I'm just not 100% sure how we're going to move forward with that.

Yeah. And then I know early on in this presentation you mentioned we're kind of moving away from hub based menus to more workspace base. A couple of people are asking questions around that, how to think about it. One is a partner asking, you know, if I'm demoing just Marketing Hub, will I have to go across different menus? People are kind of just generally curious about, I mean, maybe just repeat again what you said about the move away from hubs.

Yeah, I mean I think that when I say that what I'm, what I'm saying is that already when you purchase Marketing Hub, right. At an enterprise level, for example, you've got a ton of tools in there that are actually not just under the marketing menu, they are in other places as well. That's currently the case and it is the case even with the new nav. But what we're trying to do with the new nav is to actually bring more things into one space that makes sense together. Right. So the example I think I gave earlier of having a CRM menu that contains contacts, companies, deals, tickets, tasks, all of that I think makes sense in one space. Right. Because those are things you might be moving across frequently in your workday. You know, if you're a sales rep, for example, rather than having to move across three or four different places so that movement is still going to happen. You might be a sales rep that uses sequences. Sequences is in automation. You're going to have to go there. Right. Or use lists. It's currently under marketing. You'll have to go to marketing. But we're really trying to refine this thing so that more tools that make sense together are actually together and not scattered. And, and so there's less of that sort of. It's, it's. I, it's more workspace sort of role oriented navigation than just hub.

Yeah. And hearing you say that, I mean thinking about it as someone who teaches people how to use HubSpot, I, I can imagine actually it would be really nice to be able to say, okay, sales rep, here are the CRM sorts of things you're going to use. Here are the automation things you're going to use now. Marketing person, exact same talk track, but slightly different items. You know, under each of these, like the shape of how you move through your day to do different actions will be the same. So I like that. It feels simpler to me. One person is asking anywhere in particular you would like feedback logged. If we were trying out the new nav. I know you mentioned the Slack space. If people. How do people find that?

So typically, if somebody's reaching out to me and they're asking to be ungated, I'm ungating them and inviting them to Slack. So if you are one of those people and you haven't received the Slack invitation, check spam and so on, because it might be in there, I could have totally spaced on it and not invited you because I mean, I've literally had like a hundred requests recently. So I'm sure I've made some mistakes along the way because it's a pretty manual process process. So if you're just not seeing that invitation, let me know. You know, if you can email me, just tell me, I'll invite you. But that's a great space for, for the feedback. Yeah, because we want that kind of qualitative feedback and. And again, people are able to engage with one another, to learn from one another, to sort of think through various issues with one another. So it's really great, I think, both from a sort of research standpoint and from, I hope from the customer standpoint.

Yeah. And to that point I'm seeing a lot of questions here about specific things like where are custom objects located? Will it be easier to find tracking URLs? I would say take these questions over to Slack so that rather than just having Anthony answer them now and they disappear forever, documenting them there in that Slack space for the other people working on this project to see and to engage with I think is really important. Similarly, John says he uses surveys for market research. So we look for it in marketing. Never think to look under automation. This is all great feedback to put in that Slack channel. That's where it's going to work better. Gemma mentions she's going to miss the Sprocket as the home icon. I also love the Sprocket menu. I haven't played around enough with the new nav to know for sure. I know currently we have a setting where you can set your homepage and then that Sprocket takes you there at any point. Is that same functionality in the new nav?

Yeah. So I'm glad this is being asked about and I think I can sympathize with the sprocket versus little house icon thing. I will tell all of you this. That homepage in the coming year will be a big area of research and development for us. So we are actually thinking a lot about. This is where customization comes in. A homepage where you can actually see the things that you want to see and engage with the kinds of information that you want to engage with. How exactly that's going to look, I don't know. I have no idea. We're really at the beginnings of research there, but we're hoping that that is a space where people can have quick links to things that they need. Maybe mini dashboards if they want that some people want to see their tasks right away or they want deals right away or something like that. I'm envisioning potentially a sort of widget thing where you can move things around again from an engineering standpoint, I'm not an engineer, so I can come up with things and have no idea how easier, difficult they are to create. But that is the hope for that homepage. That it really could be a space where people can have. It is a home in a sense, because currently it kind of isn't right. And maybe at that point the home icon will feel a little bit better.

Yeah, yeah, No, I love that. And people are loving it in the chat. I know that's been a long time internal dream in HubSpot. What does a home base look like? And to finally get that figured out would be great. So a couple of pretty niche requests. I know we're right up at time here. April would like to know if she can get a copy of the feedback video you tried to share that we didn't have sound for. Because she would love to get her teams excited about the new nav. I love that thought. Maybe reach out in the Slack channel. April.

Yeah. Well, I think I have to say I probably should not be sharing that. I mean, these are folks that I've interviewed. Like it's fine for me to kind of do it now, but to like throw it out into the world without their permission, I think wouldn't be a cool thing to do.

So yeah, sorry, April. No, I love the enthusiasm though. Tripp asks how knowledge based articles, Academy and et cetera are going to be updated and when we can see this documentation. As an Academy person, I can tell you that's Something we were thinking through. Almost every Academy video says to access this tool, click on this button and then select this. And so there's a lot of updating we're going to have to do and how we cross that bridge we are trying to figure out. But I don't know if we are currently planning either on the Academy side or the Knowledge Doc side. A piece that's just. Welcome to the new navigation. Here's how it works. But I could definitely see that being valuable and that's certainly something I'll take back to the team. Yep, lots of opinions here on where things are or could be or should be. So I'm just gonna say take that to the Slack channel. Since we've got basically one minute left here, we're gonna be able to. You're gonna have a more fruitful discussion there than if we try to just do a speed round of questions here at the end with Anthony. So I think I'm going to call it there. That's, that's. Thank you, Anthony, so much for being here. The hundred of you who are still here, we got up to like 140 or 150. Thank you so much for joining in. Again, if any of you have not been ungated or unlocked or whatever you want to call it for the new experience, Anthony's your man for that. Any feedback, ideas, suggestions, take them to that Slack space. And yeah, thanks so much for being here, Anthony. Really appreciate it.

Thank you. Thank you, Kyle. And thanks to all of you again, such fabulous customers. I have to say, every time I chat with customers, I'm so delighted to be working at HubSpot because it's just such a joy and the engagements are always really open and just absolutely beautiful. So thanks to all of you for giving me the space and the time to chat with you about all of this. And yeah, I look forward to your feedback and for our continued arguments about where things should go and how that's part of the job. Right?

Yeah, absolutely. Okay. We are at time, so.