One of the most exciting changes to come in the 3.0 release of VMware Cloud Foundation is the complete overhaul of our user interface. Over the past 18 months, our UI team has been hard at work designing and building an interface that is both visually appealing and easy to use. Everything was built from the ground up using VMware’s open source Clarity design system (https://vmware.github.io/clarity/).
Building a New User Experience…
Updating a product’s look and feel is never an easy task. Our focus since day one of this project has been on the customer experience. Behind all our screens and workflows are countless hours of customer interviews, design sessions, and customer feedback meetings. We have taken all that input to heart and iterated on our designs until we felt they addressed our customer needs. In fact, the version that you see today is nothing like our initial designs shown at the VMworld 2017 Design Studio.
Through all our interviews and touch points with customers, we boiled down four major guiding principles for our new user interface:
Consistent and Intuitive End-to-End Workflows. One piece of feedback we heard repeatedly is that workflows need to be consistent and intuitive. Consistency across our workflows means that it is easier for users to get trained and accustomed to the design patterns within our product. As a result, similar actions in SDDC Manager (such as deploying vRealize Operations and Automation) will follow the same workflow sequence.
Accessibility to Information and Workflows. How often have you struggled to find the right configuration item within the products you use? We went through several iterations of design just to make sure discovery of information and workflows was as simple as possible. You should be able to find the screens you need within a few clicks of logging in.
Improved UI Responsiveness and Performance. A user interface should feel fast and responsive. Any time you have to wait for information to load or a workflow to run is a poor experience. To this point, we made some back end changes to ensure that the UI screens would load much quicker than before.
Extensible to Accommodate New Features. We recognize that Cloud Foundation will have an ever evolving and expanding feature set. As a result, we made sure any designs we came up were “future proof” to accommodate new functionality. We spent extra time building out design patterns and workflows that could be re-used for future roadmap items.
For more information about the new user interface of VMware Cloud Foundation, work with your VMware account team to schedule a demo today! For some additional resources, refer to the links below:
VMworld 2018 US Session with User Interface Demos: https://videos.vmworld.com/global/2018/videoplayer/22215
VMware Cloud Foundation Product Page: https://www.vmware.com/products/cloud-foundation.html
