TLDR? Modern Interface user-unfriendly - Classic Interface was fantastic. 
Are other schools finding the same thing? Or is it just us?

I want to preface this by saying that we have been a d6 school since 2017. We were one of the early adopters in Cape Town, have been very happy with d6 over the years, and have actively recommended d6 as a school management system to other schools.
This isn't a case of “we don't like change.”  I work in IT, and I understand that interfaces evolve and that users have to adapt.

However, I am genuinely struggling to see the functional benefit of the new “Modern” interface.

The Classic interface was incredibly efficient. Categories such as People or System were clearly defined, and the various options within those categories were presented horizontally across the page. You could look at the screen and immediately see the structure:

People → Staff | Learners | Learner Overview | Parents | etc.

System → General | Communication | etc.

The new interface has essentially turned this into one long, vertically scrolling list, with options hidden behind dropdowns. In practice, this means significantly more scrolling, more searching and, particularly when you're working quickly, more opportunities to miss the category you're looking for and have to scroll back up to find it.

The old interface may not have been as “modern” aesthetically, but it was functional, scannable and extremely easy to navigate.

I also genuinely miss the colour-coded buttons. They weren't just decorative. For regular users, the colours became visual shortcuts. As someone who assists staff with IT, I could say “Go to People, find the yellow button, then click the green one” and know that they would find it immediately. That kind of visual navigation is incredibly useful in a busy school environment.

What I find particularly frustrating is that the area where I felt d6 genuinely needed improvement was the mobile experience. Instead of improving that, it feels as though significant development effort has gone into making the desktop interface look more “modern” — while the new interface is arguably even more cumbersome to use on a phone.

And this is where I think there is an important distinction between modernising a design and improving a user experience.

A cleaner, more corporate-looking interface isn't necessarily a better interface. Sometimes the older design contains visual cues and information architecture that make a system faster and easier to use.

I'd genuinely like to know:

Are other schools finding the same thing?

Is the new interface making your staff more efficient, or are you also finding yourselves scrolling through menus, opening and closing dropdowns, and searching for things that were previously immediately visible?

I'm very open to being told that I'm in the minority here. 😅 But after using d6 for almost a decade, I would really like to understand whether this is simply an adjustment period for long-term users, or whether there is broader concern about the usability of the new interface.

Because from where I'm sitting, the Classic interface wasn't broken. It was actually one of the things that made d6 so easy to use.