As far as I can see, there is no other category to start threads to provide feedback about the new UI, so I’ll add mine here. (Perhaps you should add a UI category?) To summarise the below, I fear that by focussing the UI on how CircleCI is structured (pipeline/workflow/job) you’ve blindsided yourselves to the fact that for many use cases, jobs (and thus logs) are the key element, not pipelines/workflows.
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The new UI seems quite slow. Particularly when accessing a project for the first time. This is partly because of the jarring “all white” loading screen.
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There is no way to see currently running jobs across all projects. This is a vital aspect of the old UI that allows me to view everything going on across the whole company. Obviously, it doesn’t scale to larger companies, but for smaller companies I think it is a vitally useful view that seems to have been discarded (and will make me less productive). The new UI also seems to have removed the view of all jobs per project.
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It takes more clicks to see the logs than before. This one is critical as it is what developers do all the time. Having to find the right project in a drop down, then the right pipeline, then click through the workflow before finally getting to the job with the logs. While I fully understand that this matches the structure of the config and Circle CI’s internal database, it isn’t a helpful UI experience at all. Your new UI has made my developers’ daily activities worse.
In many cases, there is only one job in a workflow. The new UI design hasn’t taken that into account, leading to an extra click to go through an entirely pointless workflow page.
It is possible to skip the workflow page, by clicking the small triangle on the pipelines page to see the jobs in the pipeline. But this is not obvious UI design and is a very small location to click on the page, requiring rather precise mouse positioning.
- The new UI is quite wasteful with screen space. To make it usable at all, I’ve had to reduce the font size in the broswer using Ctrl-Minus. On the pipelines page, why does each job need an ID on the page? Its not clickable and not interesting information AFAICT. Why does each row need a menu at the end? It takes up a lot of space for something that doesn’t seem useful. The start time and duration also use a lot of space,
The columns also seem badly thought through. The branch name and commit message are typically quite long. Having a narrow column for each of them results in wrapping, using up vertical screen and making them hard to read (the commit message wraps almost all the time). It would make much more sense to have a single wide column with the branch name above the commit message. With two lines per pipeline, the start time and duration could also be stacked in a single column. Finally, with 2 lines per pipeline and stacked columns, you could add a column for jobs, showing two jobs (handling the common case where a workflow has one job).
Here is my sketch of my concept of a better layout:
In my opinion, this UI is not ready to be rolled out as it makes developer tasks harder. However, if you intend to proceed here are two simple/quick changes you could make to mitigate the worst aspects:
- Turn the pipeline ID into a link that performs the same action as the little triangle, showing the jobs
- When a pipeline is running or failed, automatically expand the little triangle(s), so developers can get to the logs quicker, maybe showing the failed jobs (and if there are more than 5 jobs in a workflow, perhaps a “see more detail” link to the workflow page)
Really however, I think that bigger changes are needed, as indicated above.
