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NWE slower than Classic

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Level 6

I'm training and moving 10 or so people from classic Workfront to the New Workfront experience every week. Every week some of those people complain to me about how much slower NWE is than Classic (page load times). There were a lot of posts about this last year, but I haven't seen anything recently.

Are other companies experiencing this? Is this still something that Workfront is working on? I've personally been on NWE long enough that I don't remember what the load times were like on Classic.

Thank you!

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12 Replies

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Level 10

I think you haven't seen any new posts about this because people just gave up. It IS still a problem. I can't even present within Workfront for fear I'll get a white screen or a 5 minute load time. We use screenshots to present now. The trust is gone.

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Level 10

Agreed, I gave up complaining.

They want concrete evidence that I can't provide without extensive study and…who has time? I can think of ways to do it, but management isn't going to give me that kind of time. Workfront should have load time data on their end. There are industry best practices. There is focus group testing. Heck, have a chat with their Support crew, I'm sure they are aware of it.

Giving live training/tutoring can be embarassing and is a barrier to adoption. The requesters, WF Proof reviewers, and planners *have* to use it, but they are annoyed by it and try to bypass it when possible.

I had hoped when Adobe picked this up that we might get a pause in "adding the latest cool feature" releases and have at least one that fixes behind-the-scenes items and little annoyances; like speed.

And while we're at it, can we make WF more VPN friendly? Our company uses fairly strict, but near as I can tell fairly standard, firewall/VPN/filtering and WF either doesn't work or is even slower when on our VPN. Having to tell people to log-out adds another layer of adoption issues. This is the "new normal" for some of us…

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Level 3

Your experience mirrors mine. We've currently only transitioned our Workers to the new interface, and we started noticing super slow loading. I submitted a support ticket that turned into a back-and-forth between my company's IT team and WF Support for a few months, but no one could diagnose the issue. Eventually WF Support asked us to provide them with video recordings of instances where it was slow, but like you said, we don't have the time, and it would be sporadic, thus making it hard to capture.

We also work with strict VPN, and that's where we experience a lot of our issues. Our ticket eventually just fell to the wayside.

We're fully transitioning all of our users on April 13 and I'm anxious to see how that goes. Like Chloe, I've been working in the new interface for almost a year now, so I don't remember what the load times were like in Classic. I'm sure my users will contact me if they face loading issues. I really hope the Workfront team will take this seriously, as it's a big issue for users.

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Level 6

Hi Erica, just curious, how have loading times been since you transitioned on the 13th?

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Level 3

Hi Justin, they haven't improved. It's very sporadic; sometimes Workfront works smoothly, other times it takes forever to load and I have to refresh the page multiple times.

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Level 10

I actually gave them video of a list taking over 5 minutes to load but of course nothing came of it. Maybe if we weren't so bogged down with the latency and slowdown issues, we would have time to help document and diagnose.

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Level 8

We were having these issues for months and thought it was the VPN or personal internet connections. I had many interactions with Support and our IT team to try and resolve.

We found that people were on older Macs (2016 model) which was causing a lot of headaches with slowness and errors. Once they were upgraded to newer model Macs, these issues quickly went away. We also had one user on an older MacOS and once she put the installed the latest the issues subsided for her.

I hope this helps.

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Level 10

Same problems on Windows boxes and M1 Macs too. I even used Workfront on my Windows-based gaming PC (which is a lightning-fast beast with more RAM and VRAM than I care to admit I paid for) with the exact same results.

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Administrator

Hello @Chloe WieseYoung‚ @Randy Roberts‚ @Kevin Quosig‚ @Erica Lorenzo‚ @Kiersten Kollins‚ - thank you for your feedback. I have looped in Tracy Smith, who is the Program Manager at Workfront overseeing the new Workfront experience transition. Please see below for his response.

“Hello Community and especially those that are seeing this message. For the last many months, I've been organizing and focusing our efforts around improving performance in our application with particular focus on the new Workfront experience.

Our focus areas have been with Lists, Reports, Dashboards and Documents. We just finished an update to Documents in the last couple weeks, and over the last few months, there has been regular improvements released to Production for Lists, Reports, and Dashboards. Our metrics show huge improvements in all of these areas in the new Workfront experience. For example, Lists are now over 60% faster than before. Reports and Dashboards are also faster and benefit from the improvements with Lists. Our initial data shows that, on average, Documents are 2.5 times faster now than it was before. When I refer to Documents, I am talking about how fast the Documents pages display not how fast documents are uploaded or downloaded.

We still have more work to do with lists, but the work we have done so far impacts over 90% of all lists and reports used in our system. Over the next many months, we have several teams focused on improving the Update Stream, Home Worklist, and Timesheets.

With that said, it is painful to hear the experiences you are sharing in this discussion. We have engineering resources that are ready to look into any situation with you. We do have tons of data that we track to help us focus on improving performance and that data shows we've made huge improvements in the area I shared above. I know opening a Support ticket takes time and effort. I just want you to know that there is significant focus on performance right now and I am personally very motivated to identify and fix the problem areas.

If you decide to open a support ticket, please ask the Support Engineer to tag me on the ticket (Tracy Smith) so I can be immediately aware of it and help facilitate the investigation.”

If you have any further questions for Tracy or myself, please let us know in the comments.

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Level 10

Thanks for the reply although a bit too little too late. I've opened several suport tickets and gotten the runaround just like everyone else. We've heard all this "focus on performance" stuff before. If you really want to identify the problem I'll do it for you right here. This is just the result of not doing proper QA before releasing the product, plain and simple.

In your second paragraph, you say lot's of things are xx% faster than before. Faster than before what? Switching over to NWE? I think not. Until the speed and latency is at the level it was with Classic, you will have unhappy customers… if they're still customers by then.

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Level 10

In case anybody from Workfront is reading this I'm going to chime in that the place where I experience really awful slowness is on the Reports tab - I always have to refresh several times and wait for months for those pages to load. I wonder if the people experiencing the most slowness are because their setup uses a lot of Reports or Dashboards on the pages you view the most.