I really miss the HubSpot orange buttons They gave the UI a lot more personality and made it feel unmistakably like HubSpot.
The new design feels very black and white, which makes it look a bit soulless and, for me, harder to read and navigate comfortably.
If bringing back the orange styling isn’t possible, it would be great to have theme options (similar to Windows), so users could choose the look that feels best to them. That would make the experience much more enjoyable while accommodating different preferences.
The new UI is a serious step in the wrong direction. The company and contact record pages are now effectively in black‑and‑white, which strips out visual contrast and makes the product noticeably harder to look at and work in for any length of time. The new font is flatter, shorter, and more angular, and it is objectively more difficult to read than the previous smoother Arial‑style type. On top of that, removing color from deal stages makes navigating boards more confusing and slower, because you’ve taken away immediate visual cues that users rely on to understand status at a glance.
It genuinely feels like this redesign came out of an AI‑driven “modernization” exercise rather than a user‑driven design process. The interface now looks generic instead of purposeful, and it actively increases visual fatigue and cognitive load. This is not just a matter of taste; it has real impact on productivity and makes the product less pleasant to use, which is likely to reduce adoption, especially among heavy daily users.
Forcing this change as the only option makes it worse. A theme change should be optional and should create clear improvements, not simply flatten button shapes and remove all useful color. If you want to experiment with an AI‑style minimalist theme, make it a selectable theme and let users opt in. Rolling it out as a mandatory default, when the net effect is a blander, harder‑to‑read, harder‑to‑navigate UI, is a misstep that needs to be reconsidered.
Please return the orange , the grey is genuinely adversely effecting my mood whilst working. Also the colour contrast between red and orange (high/medium) for ‘priority’ tags is really tricky to distinguish now. The canban board in Help Desk is significantly harder to read with all the grey/lines/low contrast headings.
Agreed, it feels really soulless and certainly not an exciting platform to have to stare at all day… feels more like a punishment than an upgrade. I fully second the idea to allow users to customise interface rather than have it dictated by an update which provides no upgrade
Based on what I’m reading in the comments of this blog, moving forward with the required visual update is not popular with a lot of users. @MeganDumas is your team taking this into consideration with just over 30 days to go in Beta?
If you’d like to switch back to the classic theme for now, you can do so by leaving the public beta directly from the in-app product notification you used to opt into the public beta. I do want to note that if you are enrolled in another public beta that requires the new theme, you may not see the UI revert to classic.
In terms of the feedback you provided, we sincerely apprecaite the feedback, and I will pass this onto our product team to help guide future improvements we make to the new theme!
I too have to second the general view that something did not quite go according to plans with the new design. I immagine that the preferred route is keeping one design and not allow multiple themes as that would be additional work to maintain to the high standard we are used to.
News that the Classic theme will be sunset on August 31st in favour of what we can now preview is a bit troubling, in a sense feels like the very first time that the community is receiving a change that is unwelcome in its current form. Goes to show how much HubSpot did get right so far!
There is already a ton of valuable comments before me and I have to admit to agree to a vast majority.
Perhaps see if the most recurring comments can be turned into subtle changes to the new theme that will bring some elements back from the classic.
I personally I am not a big fan of now having to click 3 times instead of 1 to reach ‘Edit columns’ in a View table I just wish that ‘Edit columns’ could live in both places, prominent 1 click away and it new rightful home following your new settings structure/logic.
Totally agree. I’d like to know what A/B testing or feedback this was based on.
Enforcing a rollout on customers is a bad move - if it’s for technical or security reasons then I get that but in this case so much of it is just interface changes that seem to have been made without full consideration.
Thanks Megan. I had managed to work it out.
I’m now using a mix of the old theme with some of the newer features which actually isn’t bad at all - just wish we had the chance to keep it this way. I’ve showed the new version to several of our team members including developers, support team leads and our own product leadership team and I have to say the feedback hasn’t been positive.
Echoing the sentiment of my peers. Please give the option to switch themes. I’ve only been in the beta for a couple of hours and I have a migraine. It’s not easy to read visually.
My department agrees that the new theme with grayscale is not user friendly. It feels disorienting and heavy on the eyes. Who approved this? Is there an option to change color?
Couldn’t agree more! I am so disappointed with this new direction. Thank you for your in-depth opinion, I did a similar thing in their feedback box and was hoping to speak to someone directly about it.
I like the idea of introducing themes to allow for internal branding or different preferences. Bonus points for those of us with multiple brand units if we could have colors that fit each one, and users could be set to having a primary brand. There are other permissions things that would benefit from that users-brands relationship setting as well.
There could also be user-based overrides- there are very few if any themes you could ever create that will be accessible to all kinds of vision impairment or migraine/photo sensitivity, and also appeal to people’s various aesthetics as far as having the portal pleasant for them to use. It would be great to have the ability to have specific themes for different kinds of color-blindness, or for people with poorer vision in general where everything needs to be bigger and therefore different thought needs to be paid to what goes where to still have most of the information they need at a glance, or for the number of us with migraine tendencies perhaps darker themes in general. I’ve been making UI’s for various tools internally and have found interestingly enough that to ease eyestrain some people need lighter themes and some darker. I don’t know what accounts for that, but with all the above it’s easy to see you aren’t going to be able to satisfy everybody with one setup. Perhaps people even set it up as specifically a bunch of orange in various places to easily distinguish it from some other portal they use shrug
On a completely different note, please don’t make AI nav mandatory. We have a relatively strict set of actions people take from each role on the various deals, and that will only get more so as we start to integrate with more internal systems. I’m seeing all kinds of things that as an admin I’d be rather concerned about- like does the AI have more context than the user has permission to see? Does it have more abilities than the user has permission to do?
How our data and deal progress looks like in Hubspot isn’t what the model’s going to expect, due to many of the things it wants to know being handled in internal tools instead of in Hubspot, and the nature of our business and our sales team structure. I don’t believe the tool will have the information it’ll really be able to consistently leverage, nor am I anticipating that changing going forward right now due to privacy/data protection issues and the number of processes handled in pre-existing in-house tools. Also once people know where to find a piece of information, particularly if the record customization is done well, the AI would simply get in the way instead of helping them get to the information they need any faster.
Bro this is the most depressing update. Its all so sad and colorless. What do you mean I have to state at grey all day. The contrast is so bad it lowkey hurts your eyes.
I just used the new beta theme for 5 minutes and switched back and it feels so nice to be back. You really dont know what you have until its gone!
They gave the UI a lot more personality and made it feel unmistakably like HubSpot.