After months of hard work, we officially launched our new UI today.
We want to thank all CircleCI users who posted, tweeted, and completed UX sessions as we developed the interface. Your feedback allowed us to ensure the best possible experience for teams to build, test, and deploy quality code.
Pipelines
The biggest upgrade to the new UI is the orientation around pipelines rather than jobs. The jobs-based view was built for CircleCI 1.0 and was ideal for users with simple configurations. Teams working on complex projects, however, needed more visibility, and the new UI delivers. The new pipelines-based view groups all jobs together into a workflow and all workflows into a pipeline, which allows everyone working on a project to easily find the information relevant to their run as quickly as possible.
Recently, we enabled users to cancel and rerun a workflow from the pipelines page, an improvement that we prioritized specifically because our users requested it!
Speed
Senior product manager, Kate Catlin, who led this project, is most excited for users to experience faster page load times on the new UI. “Developers are busy and they’re on our platform to accomplish specific tasks and get back to writing code,” Catlin said. “By reducing the amount of time it takes for each screen to load information, and rearranging that information to prioritize what’s most important, we get developers back to delivering new features faster.”
Other improvements for quick navigation
Some other exciting improvements you’ll see on the new UI include:
- A cross-project pipelines view for increased visibility across teams
- Type-to-search on the branch and project picker to easily filter the pipeline view
- Auto-open for failed and most recent pipelines on the dashboard for ease of navigation
- A default view of the Test Summary tab upon failure so the most important information is always at your fingertips
What’s to come
In the near future, you can expect to see more pipeline-specific information, like the ability to see which orbs were used in each pipeline. CircleCI orbs are reusable snippets of YAML configurations that condense repeated configs into a single line of code. They help automate processes and are easy to integrate with the third-party tools that developers already use.
One of the most exciting updates we’ll be making is an Insights UI built specifically for the new pipelines-based UI. Stay tuned for more information on Insights.
Some of the other exciting UI improvements coming soon include:
- Faster navigation through improved breadcrumbs at the top of each page
- A better summary of failed tests
- The ability to close all opened pipelines on the pipelines page with the click of a button
Supporting developers in a changing world
For Catlin, the drive to improve CircleCI’s UI has always been about helping developers get better at what they do — now more than ever.
“There is a lot of uncertainty in the world right now, but it is my personal belief that software developers have a key, irreplaceable role to play in driving us towards a future in which we can conquer these challenges,” Catlin said. “Helping software developers do their jobs better, faster, and with fewer errors helps us conquer the new challenges facing the world.”
To learn more about our new UI, check out our docs or read more about why the new UI was built for increased user productivity.
