Will the experimental UI once replace the legacy UI?
Hi,
while trying out the experimental UI several times after an update, me and most of my colleagues immediately switch back to the legacy UI as the new UI is almost unusable even if it provides the functionality. But options are either hidden in drop down menus or the overview for a build going over several configuration is not possible anymore. The overview of all build agents is also not there anymore. Everything is hidden in some drop downs which makes it hard to get a proper overview. Following the last releases of Teamcity, I saw that some new functionality only made it only to the experimental UI and not to the legacy UI anymore. My concern is a big productivity loss when Teamcity will set the new UI as the standard and don't support the legacy UI anymore. The experimental UI needs a general overhaul with the focus of bringing back the old way for getting the overview on a first view or a complete new design approach.
But I would like to also get some feedback from the community if other people feel the same or if it's just us who have a strong opinion against the new UI approach?
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Hi Frank,
While our intention is that the experimental UI will eventually replace the legacy one as the default, there is no current plan to remove the old one. We of course cannot state that it will not be removed at all but there is no plans for it in the near future (next major versions).
Regarding your issues, it would be helpful if you could provide specific feedback about missing features or usability problems that you and your team have found. We still consider it experimental because we understand it needs work before it's fully featured, including usability, so please don't hesitate to share specifics rather than generic statements, so that we can work on those. We do internal usability testing, but we cannot cover every user scenario and workflow, so feedback is important to improve on what we miss.
About missing features in the old UI, you can consider as well opening feature requests for them to be ported back in our issue tracker here: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issues/TW. While we cannot guarantee they will be ported back, as some of them might be too hard to do without the foundations provided by the new one, we might be able to provide some of them or similar enough ones if there is enough traction for them.
While I hope some of the community chimes in with their opinions as well, we can state that while there are some specific criticisms and some generic complaints like some of what you mentioned, most of the comments we have received both internally and externally have been positive.
Hi Denis,
thanks for your reply. As the first main issues that I always see immediately is the problem that the hierarchy of the projects and sub projects is not maintained anymore in the detailed overview on the right panel. Before it was easily visible in this way:
In the new UI it becomes a flat hierarchy which is hard to see the full project setup on a first look.
Next issue is that a lot of options are hidden in PullDown menus under "More" and I don't see a reason why as there is so much space on the right side where you could easily list all these options. I have to go into this menu and bring every single option manually back. Why isn't the default to show all of them and let the user hide it if he is not interested?
The buildagent overview is basically not existent anymore. On the Legacy UI I got instantly an overview over all build agents and what they are currently doing. This page is completely gone in the experimental UI.
These are just the first things that comes to my mind and bothers me a lot.
Hi Frank,
thanks for sharing. I forwarded the thread to our frontend team and they were happy to have specific feedback they can work on, so it was picked up quickly and we have set up the following issues in our tracker, some of which already existed:
1- https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/TW-64146
2- https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/TW-63893
3- https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/TW-63989
Please consider watching and voting for them to help push their development and stay notified of updates to its progress.
As I mentioned, the experimental UI is in experimental state because we understand it has limitations and we need to still put work on it before it can fully replace the old one, so please, if you face any other issues, don't hesitate to report them. If you can specify them as you did in the last message, our issue tracker is usually the way to go. While searching for the issue first would hopefully be preferred, we have the ability to mark them as duplicates just fine, so please feel free to at least just add them. We'd rather have a duplicate report of an issue than a non-reported issue.