August 2026 update – HORRIBLE article status icons
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Expected Condor
Your newest August 2026 update introduced an icon change for published articles with an active draft for "clarity". This removed the yellow dot as a draft article indicator and replaced it with an icon that is nearly similar to the published icon: green with a sliver of yellow on the right and bottom (signifying a draft article, yellow, sitting underneath a published article, green).
Problem is, the new icon is very difficult to distinguish at a glance from the regular green published article and significantly REDUCES clarity. I can also image this would be hard to see for users who are visually impaired, not only because blurry vision would obscure the yellow sliver, but people with red/green color blindness wouldn't be able to easily distinguish the green on top of the yellow. Either way, scannability has now severely decreased when I am looking through folders and trying to find articles that have edits, because the yellow dot icon was so easy to spot sitting to the very right of the words.
I think the old system was honestly way better and more straightforward. The color of the article indicated published (green) / unpublished (yellow) / formerly published (grey), and the dot icon indicated whether the article was in edit mode (yellow) or NEEDED editing because it was stale (red). This made articles in edit mode or needing edits way easier to see from the sidebar.
The new article favors showing publish mode (green icon with yellow sliver) over whether an article is in edit mode. And for me, whether an article is published is way less important than whether an article has a draft. Drafts change day-to-day, especially if multiple writers are working in the same KB. So I want to easily have a visual indicator if someone's working on a new draft.
Please do something to these new icons. It really does have a huge impact for end-users. My ability to quickly open folders and scan the KB has been severely impacted, and it's going to slow my work in many respects. And I know there are visually impaired users or those with color blindness who are pulling their teeth over this change as well.
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Lilac Barracuda
agree that I found it confusing and less user-friendly as well. I see the new fix now and I still don't like it
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Expected Condor
Lilac Barracuda Agreed, the change is better than what it was prior but I still preferred the circular icons separate and to the right of the article rather than lumped in with the icon itself.
Premkumar Nandagopal
Thanks for taking the time to share detailed feedback on the recent changes related to the Article Icon with the status indicator. We are sorry that you had to go through this challenge because of this change.
Problem we tried to solve: There were users who faced challenges in spotting the dot draft indicator and correlating it with the draft edits available on top of the published version. In addition to this, when there is a stale version, the two indicators (Yellow + Red) are combined together.
New design approach: We wanted to indicate the two versions of the Article — Publish (Green) and Draft (Yellow) — in a single icon form. That's why we have the two copies of the file icon to indicate the two statuses, and Publish takes precedence since that is how the current Publish article icon works and we don't want users to have a change in that. With this change, the dot indicator for Stale (Red) is now on the right side independently, always with good clarity.
What we missed: When the changes were made available in production along with our compact UI strategy, we too realized that the Yellow highlight is very thin and it does not give good clarity on what we had originally intended to change. Also, we missed the private lock icon indicator, which made the situation even worse. The moment we noticed this in production, we started to review the changes by increasing the yellow highlight on the new change or bringing back the dot to an even more appropriate position.
How we are fixing it now: Since most users are familiar with the Yellow dot, we are bringing back the yellow dot on top right of the Published (Green) article icon to indicate there is a draft on top of the published version. The Stale (Red) dot will be independent, on the right side of the Article title.
We are planning to have this change made available on 7-Sep (Monday). Thanks for your understanding and patience.
Regards,
Premkumar
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Expected Condor
Premkumar Nandagopal Great to hear, thank you!
Also, it looks like user's names are deliberately anonymized in this feature request platform for posts, comments, and likes. But Doc360 employees like yourself may still be able to see our names to tie us back to our accounts.
It may be wise NOT to reference users by their names when commenting back to them, since that defeats the purpose of these generated pseudonyms. Maybe that's something you can communicate to the rest of the Doc360 customer success team and other Doc360 employees who are able to leave comments in this platform.
Thanks for the explanation and looking forward to the change! :)
Premkumar Nandagopal
The icon fixes are push to production now. Please share your valuable feedback.
Regards,
Premkumar
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Expected Condor
Premkumar Nandagopal I see the changes now, thank you!
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Linear Porpoise
Strongly agreed that the old system was much clearer!
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Expected Condor
If possible, could someone on the Doc360 team share why these changes were made in the first place?