Hi there,
I decided to try the new UI for the first time today and overall I think it’s a step backward. While I have many of the same complaints as others about the new UI (can’t see all the jobs for a specific workflow, can’t see list of all jobs, more button clicks to do important tasks, etc), there is one more piece of feedback I’d like to give that I haven’t seen in any of the other topics here.
This problem partially has to do with how our project is set up in CircleCI. But, our setup is essentially the same as the 2nd example in the config.yml documentation, so I would guess that a lot of CircleCI users have the same pattern of configuration as us meaning they also have the same new UI problem.
In the old UI, I would only see commits to certain branches on the “Pipelines” page. So, for our 4 cloud environments at any given time there is one branch connected to each environment, and those 4 branches (plus any that were connected to the environments in the past) are the only ones I would see commits to in CircleCI. That makes sense to me, and that is the way I would like things to work.
In the new UI, I see every commit to every branch that the dev team is working on. This is rather annoying… I would guess between all our developers we make at least 10-20 commits a day to branches we’re working on (which should have nothing to do with deployment). In the new UI they are all crowding up the Pipelines page and making it hard to find our actual deployments. We typically deploy maybe once a day (sometimes less sometimes more depending on what we’re working on), so probably 95% of the commits listed in this new UI are just clutter as far as I’m concerned.
Here are some screenshots of what I’m talking about:
Old UI:
(It won’t let me add more that one screenshot in my post, but what I see in the old UI is only the commits that actually triggered workflows: the ones with Status: success/failed/running below)
I deployed to one of our environments a few times today and within the 3 hours or so that I was working on that all I saw was the 3 jobs that I triggered.
New UI:
In the new UI, there are commits from several of my coworkers that are also appearing in with my jobs over this 3 hour period. Today was a very deployment-heavy day, normally there might be one or 2 days worth of these commits from coworkers between deployments.
All the things that say “No workflow” are things that I didn’t see in the old UI, and that I really don’t ever want to see in CircleCI.
Also, another side note: I spent 10-15 minutes trying to figure out how to switch back to the new UI after opting out of it, so I could take these screenshots. Turns out the opt-in button is not in user settings or on any of the main pages, but inside the page for a specific workflow (which takes several clicks to get to and not everyone even uses). That’s not a very intuitive place to put it.