New-user-experience improvements I think Bitwarden really needs, from the perspective of a writer comparing password managers

Feature Requests Password Manager
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Hello everyone,

A few days ago I found a rather “interesting” app comparison posted on the Zapier Blog, titled Bitwarden vs. LastPass: Which is better? [2023] | Zapier. As a Bitwarden user, it’s very clear to me that the reviewer didn’t even try to spend more than a few couples on minutes using Bitwarden, and the result was an article FULL of hilariously bad errors and misinformation. So, in this topic, I will use the article to show what UX problems new Bitwarden users face, and I’ll try to give my suggestions to fix them. I will quote parts of the blog post and start from there. So, here we go:

“Bitwarden doesn’t offer a way to edit your information. You can only copy existing usernames and passwords or override existing credentials when you change them on a site.”

This is so hilarious (and at the same time sad) to read. All he had to do to edit any item was to simply just… click on the site name. But he must’ve thought clicking on the blue website link would bring you to that website, which I guess is reasonable. The obvious solution would be to make the entire space occupied by the item clickable (instead of just the URL) and to turn the background grey when a user hovers over that clickable area.

“If you only have one account for a website in LastPass, your credentials will autofill without you needing to lift a finger. Bitwarden has a similar autofill feature, but it requires an extra step. Instead of automatically autofilling your information or providing a cute little icon that expands to show all your accounts, you have to right-click, navigate to Bitwarden, hover over Auto-fill, and then select your account. […] LastPass certainly does a better job [at] making autofill as painless as possible.”

Bitwarden offers four different methods of inserting passwords (autofill on page load, clicking on the extension icon, ctrl+shift+L and right-click menu) but the reviewer thought the only method was to use the right-click menu. In my opinion, the right-click menu option should be disabled by default, and the onboarding screen for users who just installed the extension shouldn’t be just a video, but also a static explanation that the way Bitwarden lets you autofill passwords is by clicking the extension icon. This should solve the confusion.

“LastPass’s pop-up box asking whether you want to save a new password mimics Google’s—it’s attention-grabbing and clear. Bitwarden’s, on the other hand, is all too easy to miss.”

I certainly don’t agree that the Bitwarden “bar” should be turned into a pop-up, but I think it can be improved so people don’t miss it. A simple solution would be to make the background blue instead of light grey, which would make the bar much more noticeable.

“While LastPass’s content [in the web vault] expands and retracts to adapt to the size of the browser, Bitwarden leaves a lot of unused white space when the user expands their browser.”

That’s, of course, because, on the reviewer’s end, the option to resize the interface is disabled. Bitwarden can also adapt to browser size, but the reviewer didn’t notice the option in the settings. Maybe the devs could try to make the default vault space larger, make the larger option the default instead, or make the toggle in the settings stand out more.

And that’s it! Those are all the improvements highlighted by this biased and incorrect app comparison posted on the Zapier blog. I hope the devs will find my suggestions useful!

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Thanks for passing this along! :+1:

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Actually I didn’t find the article too biased (they say Bitwarden is a favorite, point out LP’s breach, including breaching trust of customers, and in the linked article they bash them), and it did bring up some interesting things for me, so thanks for the share @FaviFake!

“Ultimately, Bitwarden is best for those seeking the most advanced security features and the lowest-cost option for password management.”

This is exactly what I’d decided, and maybe the main player that brought me to BW over all others. I do find parts of the UI unintuitive, but I value its security strengths more.

The article then commends BW’s security report options. Now I have to admit, I’d never even seen this page. This is the reason I’m so pleased you brought it to my attention. And this is my message to @bw-admin

I never realised this Report Tab existed! I’ve been using BW for a few years. When I first signed up in browser, somewhere I was encouraged to install the desktop app. Apart from that, I have the W10 Firefox addon, and do most of my work there, (oh and on the excellent Android phone app as well). Through reading that Zapier article, I saw that I’d completely missed the Reports tab. This is only viewable on the Web Page view. But why would you ever need to log into that if you’ve the desktop app installed (which I’d been led to understand was the main ‘base’) and the browser addons? The Desktop app and the browser box have exactly the identical functions as far as I can make out, so how am I to know that in the web page lies whole new functionality?

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So now I’ve discovered them (and have started to use them), I thought it would be helpful to make BW aware of this confusion.

My other point:
(PLEASE NOTE: in the following I’m only talking about the left-most of the four icons on the right. The other three: copy username, copy password, copy verification code, don’t change, and I’m not talking about them)

This is raises a very good point, albeit the author is clearly wrong in his claim. The browser box can be confusing. I have W10 with Firefox, so I can only speak from the Windows perspective. Click on the BW icon and the browser box opens.

In my first example below, I’m on the forum here. On the left-hand bit I’ve got auto-fill, which is a bit like Launch, and to the right of this there is an icon, which currently is View. Confusingly, the two button areas reverse roles, as I’ve shown further down.

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But if I then search for another website from here, the View icon confusingly goes to the left side, and Launch (which is somewhat akin to auto-fill) goes over to the right.

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This has always frustrated me, as you have to hover to make sure you’ve remembered the right one, rather than it being consistent.

Also in image 3, there is no separation here between the webpage and the website link, and I think this is what FaviFake is referring to, “But he must’ve thought clicking on the blue website link would bring you to that website, which I guess is reasonable”

Still like to say I love the app!

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As a solution, maybe have the View and ‘website launch’ icons next to each other on the right-hand side, next to the other three, rather than have the various ‘functions’ moving around. This gives better consistency.

Here you go @bw-admin, as one of the ‘Community Leaders’ just got up my nose with their snottiness (yes, I know, I ‘reacted to his tone’), I thought I should give something constructive back. I had a quick play around in Photoshop, added the fifth icon, and widened it a tad.

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Thanks for the mock-up @Smithy!

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The main drawback of Bitwarden is that it is not new user friendly. This is the first time I’ve used a dedicated password manager. I had assumed that the program would operate like iCloud’s keychain or Chrome’s native password manager: simple and intuitive. My requirements are basic but I find that I’m not even offered the option of a choice of email addresses to choose from when signing on a new site. Perhaps the option is there but I can’t find any information online on how to do this. And this is just one of the problems I encountered. No learning curve is needed with iCloud or Chrome.

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Hey Smithy, thanks for the reply! I used the word “biased” because it was very clear that the author was a loyal, paying customer of LastPass and didn’t fully try to use Bitwarden, which resulted in the comparison being full of errors that make BW look way worse than it actually is. A couple of google searches would’ve easily solved most of his errors,

I wanted to clarify that in the part of the text you quoted, I was referring to the author’s experience using the web vault, where the links are blue and only become underlined when users hover them. But you brought up a different problem that I didn’t even experience, so thanks for that!

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Yup, this is very true

I’m not sure what the problem is, but if you mean that the popup asking if you want to add a new site to your vault doesn’t let you edit the email address, there’s a pretty easy way to do what you want. I usually just open the extension, click view credentials, and edit the email address from there

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I have the Google Password Manager disabled, but I leave the autofill option for “Addresses and more” enabled so that it will offer this type of info quickly and easily with a click in the text field box. As far as I know there’s not as easy of a way to do this with BW (but I’m a new user too).

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There is similar functionality in Bitwarden (but I have not compared it to the native Google functionality to determine whether it stacks up). In the browser extension, go to Settings > Options, and enable Show identities on Tab page. Then, if you have any Identity items (containing name, address, telephone, email, etc.) defined in Bitwarden, you can open the extension and left-click one of the listed identity items to autofill it into the currently active web form.

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I do have this and I agree that’s the best way I’ve found for BW to do this. If there was a keyboard shortcut to cycle through Identities (is there?) I would probably use it instead of Chrome’s built-in autofill, but with Chrome you can click in the text box and get a drop down list of items to choose from which is pretty handy. I don’t see this as high security info for my use case so Chrome works fine. For passwords I prefer BW for many reasons.

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There are at least five relevant feature requests (which should be merged, although some of them are now archived): 1 2 3 4 5

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Thanks FaviFake but I don’t mean adding addresses to the vault. When signing on to a new website, I would be asked for email address and password. I do not want to use the email address I use to sign up for Bitwarden. But although I have other email addresses in the vault, I am not given the option to choose one of them.

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Sorry, I still don’t understand your issue