CloudBees CodeShip: New Design for New Reasons

Intro

You may have noticed last week that something changed on CloudBees CodeShip. Specifically, the build item on your projects pages and personal dashboard got a little bit sleeker.

You may have also noticed that throughout the week it continued to change. I wanted to take a short moment and talk about why we made the change, and why we kept tweaking.

Feedback - Continuous Design

CloudBees CodeShip, and our wider CloudBees family, are in the continuous integration and continuous delivery business. More broadly, we aim to help product teams constantly improve their software, period. This applies to us too, though, and it’s not just code that should improve all the time, the user experience should as well. You can think of it as continuous design.

After we rolled out the new build element design, we heard a lot of feedback from users (and from people throughout the company). It wasn’t perfect! Our designers on this project, Josh South and Ryan Wilke, are already working on adjustments - and this feedback helped point them in the right direction and vet their ideas.

We don’t think any design will ever be perfect, and we know design changes will always come with some disruption to your current experience. To us, the first release is just the start and the feedback is constructive, not negative. We want to keep tweaking and that’s so much easier to do when you tell us what you don’t like.

All that said, we think we’ve ended up in a pretty solid place for this element - for now! We know it will continue to evolve in the future, but our design team has done a great job addressing everything we heard and releasing multiple iterations over the last week to address them.

Where we’re going

Cross suite

As for why we’ve made this change - it’s pretty simple. The first, and most important, reason is that we think it works better. It’s cleaner, it’s lighter, it let us give the page quite a performance boost and it’s easy to get more information on screen at once.

But, this isn’t the only place you’ll be able to find this build element. You’ll also find it inside CloudBees Core soon, the next-gen product powering heavyweight enterprise CI/CD in our product family. That’s because we’re starting to give all CloudBees products the same look and feel, and to make them all accessible to everyone who uses any one of our products today.

We know CloudBees CodeShip will need unique design solutions that don’t apply to different audiences, so don’t worry - we won’t be standardizing everything to the point of poor usability. But, we are really excited about the opportunity for our product and design teams to learn from - and improve - each other in this collaborate process.

More changes later

These aren’t the only design changes coming to CloudBees CodeShip. Within a few months, you’ll see more big visual upgrades - and performance upgrades - across the application. Just like with this one, we want you to be as vocal as you can and to know we plan to keep the work going and to address every complaint we get.

So, please get in touch! Thoughts, criticisms, suggestions - our team uses all of it to make smarter choices and we really appreciate it.