Requesting return of Search in long press iOS menu

I submitted this feedback in the beta and unfortunately heard nothing back, so trying again now that it’s in the final release.

I really really really hate this change: "Replaced the “search” menu item previously available by long pressing Bear’s icon on the home screen with “Scan Documents” Can you please reverse it or make it configurable? I’ve never once scanned a doc or taken a photo directly into Bear in years of use, but I search every single day. I need this quick access. Thank you

My user experience can’t be that unusual in the community; everyone searches, but I doubt everyone scans documents directly into Bear, or does it frequently enough to warrant a long press shortcut item on the home screen. Can this change please either be reverted or at least be configurable?

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@Claire_Bear, I only found this other thread after I already posted, please let me know if you’d like me to comment there as well or instead. It seems that several folks were voting to keep Search, but I don’t see that this feedback was responded to.

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Hi @apasternak! We gave users this choice to ensure we were making a change that the majority of users agreed with. While there were people who wanted to keep search, it wasn’t the most popular answer.

Unfortunately, we have a limited number of actions we can put in the quick action menu, so we will not be adding search back in for now. Depending on user requests, this may be an option we change again in the future.

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I understand your response, @Claire_Bear, but it seems like an unfortunate way to make decisions like this.

Why not base it on % of users who use a particular function and how frequently, something that can be observed & traced within the application? For quick entry, this could even be % of users who do a function X seconds after launching app. I would estimate Search is significantly higher here than Scan Document.

Instead we relied on an increasingly smaller subset of users who

  1. Used the beta forum,
  2. Noticed the post, and
  3. Responded to make their preference known on this issue

A tiny handful of users. I’m hoping the change is reverted down the road. Thanks for taking the time to respond however.

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@apasternak I fully support your comment!

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Hi, we also considered the fact that search only takes 2 gestures (tap the bear icon to enter Bear, pull down in the note list) while document scan takes 5 including a long press and finger move. When we asked this question, we considered the audience we have on Twitter, Reddit, and our forum, so we tried to cast a wide net.

We understand that this choice won’t benefit everyone, nothing ever will, but our goal was to make getting to our features faster and create more balance.

We apologize for your dissatisfaction & will consider your comments when we discuss the quick action menu again. Thank you for opening a discussion on this topic, we are always trying to learn from our users.

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Thank you @Claire_Bear for engaging on this topic. I am one of those people who never used search from the Bear icon, and replacing search with scanning was a nice improvement for me.
However, with that said, I wonder (I have no idea if this is even feasible from a dev standpoint) if it would be possible to change the ‘photo’ and ‘scan’ options to be folded into a single entry somehow since they both use the camera? This would then free up an entry to bring back search.

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