Access to the old UI will be shut down on August 14th

Announcements
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Hello CircleCI community,

First of all, thank you to everyone who has posted, tweeted, and completed UX sessions with us as we rebuilt our new UI. About 80% of our users have opted-in to the new UI and we’re seeing very positive feedback. You were an important part of building that!

Access to the old UI will be shut down on August 14th.

Here are some of the recent improvements you’ll see:

  • A cross-project view at the pipelines level
  • Faster page load time
  • Type-to-search on the branch and project picker
  • Auto-open for failed and most recent pipelines on the dashboard to reduce clicking
  • A default view of the Test Summary tab upon failure to reduce clicking

With all of this now available, we feel ready to advance to our pipelines-based future.

Our legacy Slack Notification settings will not be available in the new UI. If you still use our legacy, UI-based Slack Notification settings, please note that you must take the following actions to continue using Slack notifications:

  1. Remove the Slack webhook url from the legacy chat notification page: https://circleci.com/gh/ORGNAME/PROJECTNAME/edit#hooks
  2. Update your configuration file to include the Slack orb and update the config for any jobs that you would like to enable notifications for.

We know many of you have developed workflows around the old pre-pipelines world and we apologize for any disruptions to your flow. If you need to prepare for or change anything to be able to work in the new UI, please do so before August 14th. For those of you on paid plans, you can reach out to your Support or Success team member for more information.

There will still be ongoing improvements to the new UI.

With some of the upcoming changes you’ll be able to:

  • Cancel and rerun a workflow from the pipelines page
  • Access the cross-project view from the breadcrumbs
  • See a better summary of the failed tests on the Test tab
  • Close all opened pipelines on the pipelines page with the click of a button

…and more!

Keep sending us your feedback and requests.

Every voice is a data point for us on what to prioritize next. We’ll continue to ship as many solutions to your problems as we can.

Thank you in advance,

Kate Catlin
CircleCI Senior Product Manager

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Won’t this make the transition even harder for CircleCI server users, if you make major changes to CircleCI cloud over time like this while server lags years behind? When server is finally able to be replaced with something on part with CircleCI cloud, the huge pile of differences will make it difficult for existing customers make the change. Significant UI overhauls would be one of the biggest obstacles, when they’re coupled with so many other things changing.

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Thanks for bringing this up @cos, our goal is to bring the new UI to our Server customers next quarter. If all goes according to plan, you will have the option to opt-in to the new UI on Server in the November or December release.

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It’s too bad you didn’t “see” or address the negative feedback… The new UI doesn’t show as much information and seems like a step backwards for usability. Even something as simple as seeing the latest commit message is missing from workflow and job detail views. The pipeline list view is clunky to navigate - why would I care about the config file as the only action? I want to drill into the details of each pipeline/workflow or whatever it’s called now.

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Hi @jim! Thanks for taking the time to give us more feedback. We’re still adding features to the new UX (more actions for the pipelines coming soon), and we’re working hard to address the negative feedback we receive.

I’m not sure what you mean by feedback we didn’t see - we’re open on lots of platforms for feedback (including this one) and trying to address it wherever we can. If there’s more feedback you have, please let us know. Although we can’t incorporate everything, all feedback helps inform our decisions moving forward.

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Regarding the feedback, searching through this discussion site shows a number of posts describing the poor UX of the new UI. Most replies seem like a canned response of “We’re always working to improve and hope to address your concerns.”

I appreciate the few updates that have found their way to the UI, but some fundamental UX issues remain that were reported many months ago when the UI was first introduced.

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This site in particular has had some issues with visibility because of lack of staff, but we’re working to improve that. Every time we see feedback here, we send it to through to the UX team so they can evaluate. Also, some of the changes requested or recommended are set to be released before the cutoff date. We definitely don’t want anyone to feel they have an inferior experience.

I’m sorry the responses seemed lackluster. We honestly thrive off of feedback, and it’s my job to make sure you all know that. It’s our job to listen to the feedback and incorporate it in a meaningful way - hopefully, we will do that better as we move forward with this new UX.

I will get in touch with our Product team and make sure they’ve seen and heard the feedback that fell between the cracks.

I started an official feedback thread recently; if you have time, please be specific about what doesn’t work for you here so product can see it and adjust accordingly.

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Considering the rather large UX issues mentioned in the official feedback thread, would you be willing to extend the cutoff period for the old UI?

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Hi @gileze33! There are a lot of factors to decide here - I think some of the changes suggested are already works in progress, and some are easily added. It seems unlikely the date will move, but @Kate_Catlin might be able to be more specific than I can.

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Hi @gileze33,

Thank you for reaching out. We will not be moving the cutoff period back further.

Originally the cut-off date was April 15th, but we received feedback at that time about some showstoppers and we pushed the date back three months to accommodate. Here is the feedback we have seen, heard, and shipped fixes for since then:

  1. Displaying a cross-project view of the Pipelines page.
  2. Increasing page load performance time.
  3. Redirecting all old UI pages to the new UI for opted-in users.
  4. Decreasing clicks from the Pipelines level to the Job level.
  5. Colorizing step output.
  6. Fixing loading spinners to not be full-page takeovers
  7. Showing total numbers of tests run
  8. Defaulting to the test tab upon failure
  9. Showing the numbers of passed/failed tests in the test tab
  10. Showing the incident banner badge
  11. Better display of the help menu
  12. Pinning the default branch to the top of the branch picker
  13. Type-to-search on the project picker
  14. Type-to-search on the branch picker
  15. Remembering which org you’re on upon clicking go-to-app

Plus we’re about to ship (also from reading feedback):

  1. Showing rerun and rerun from failed on the pipelines page
  2. Showing cancel workflow on the pipelines page

…and more!

We’ve prioritized what we shipped based on what is user preference vs. what is a roadblock/severe hindrance to a user’s day. There are remaining items we want to fix, but given extensive qualitative sessions and very promising quantitative evidence, we feel at this time there are no true remaining roadblocks or severe hinderances.

That does not mean you should stop sending specific and actionable feedback our way. As mentioned, we will continue shipping more improvements over time. Your feedback has been heard, seen, and responded to and will continue to be responded to once everyone is on the new UI.

Thank you again for being so passionate about our product,

Kate Catlin
Senior Product Manager

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I’m starting to get used to the new UI, the ability to view pipelines from all projects made using the UI possible for me. What I still am missing is the ability to import environment variables from other projects like the old interface has, thats a key reason why i haven’t fully switched to the new UI.

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Thanks @paulconneqtech, appreciate the specificity. Have you tried using Contexts? Contexts provide a mechanism for securing and sharing environment variables across projects. The environment variables are defined as name/value pairs and are injected at runtime. We had assumed this functionality would replace the Import Env Vars functionality, but perhaps your use case is different?

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Listen,

I was an early skeptic on the new UI - a lot complaints were leveled about usability and missing features, and rightfully so. But I’ve got to say I’m really happy with incremental improvements made ot the CircleCI UI since it’s launch. It’s fast and responsive, and I’m at the point where I prefer it to the old UI.

There’s definitely more work to be done - I agree with comments like seeing the last commit message and I really need to get an overview of broken builds - but the progress is apparent. Kudos to the CircleCI for listening to us and implementing our feedback.

These forums are typically full of complaints/requests and no one takes the time to point out when good things are done.

Best,
Andrew

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I was an early skeptic as many, but will say that the new UI performance has definitely improved substantially since first launch.

However - there is a huge chunk of functionality seemingly being deprecated. The slack orb doesn’t (at least out of the box) allow for configuration to send one slack message with the status of all the jobs in the workflow per run. Please advise on how this is possible now that you are removing the slack integration UI piece. This seems like it would impact quite a few users.

  notify:
    executor: alpine
    steps:
      - slack/status:
          webhook: $SLACK_WEBHOOK


workflows:
  version: 2.1
  run_tests:
    jobs:
      - unit_tests
      - integration_tests
      - notify:
          requires:
            - unit_tests
            - integration_tests

Unfortunately waiting for the jobs with “require” also mandates that both must pass for the notify job to run. Please help!!

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The new UI makes managing our CI/CD pipelines hard. We have > 50 services/websites/native apps and the latest build for each project gets lost in the ‘All Projects’ filter because the build steps are expanded by default and the earlier builds for a project are not nested/hidden. There doesn’t seem to be a way for us to see all the latest builds for all the projects. For example if we had 3 projects and one of those projects was built 10 times today and the other two projects had not been built for a few days then the ‘All Projects’ filter shows the latest 10 builds and not the last build for each of the 3 projects. We rely on CircleCI to give us good situational awareness on the status of all of our projects and we are going to lose that key feature next month :frowning:

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Maybe you can solve this using a dashboard. FYI both GitLab and Travis CI have dashboards for this purpose:

“https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/environments/environments_dashboard.html”
“https://blog.travis-ci.com/2017-02-28-introducing-dashboard”

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Hey @chris_barton, thanks for sharing this feedback. I’m a bit confused. The “all projects” filter should return the latest builds for all the projects (that you follow) the same as the old UI did. Are you saying this is a loss in functionality between the old UI to the new UI, or a functionality you miss from Travis/GitLab?

Cheers,

Kate

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Hi Kate,

The ‘All Projects’ filter in the ‘Pipelines’ view shows the latest builds irrespective of project. Notice in the attached screenshot that row 1 is for project csr-app-web followed by row 2 project accounts-app-web and row 3 project accounts-app-web. Being able to just show the master builds would go some way to making things better because it is the branch builds that swamp things. I mention Travis CI and GitLab because they have a dashboard to enable situational awareness across a system. We basically have a system composed for many services, websites and native apps and we are deploying to production daily and we need an overview of the state of all our pending uat and production deployments. The old UI mostly gave us this but it wasn’t perfect, the new UI is not as good as the old UI in this one aspect, otherwise it is quite nice :).

The rows are collapsed now which is great :slight_smile:

Kind Regards

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See these attached screenshots comparing the old and new UIs and how it is now harder to have good situational awareness. Notice that the builds are not collapsed in the ‘My Pipelines’ view although they are in the ‘Everyone’s Pipelines’ view. The collapsed view is better for situational awareness.

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