The Kitewheel Hub June 2018 Release sees the first release of a major user interface overhaul. Every user interface component has been redesigned and reimplemented. Our changes are based on a wide range of user experience surveys, research and many, many, support calls. We have tried to design an easier to use, easier on the eye product. We hope that you like it and we hope that this is much more new shoes than new coke.

These changes also lay the groundwork for further improvements and new features in the product. Now that we have given ourselves space in which to put these we feel we can make progress more quickly.

User Experience

The goal with the user experience was to give a proper home for projects. We realised that the tiles on the home screen were the only place you could see a "project" summary - but that it didn't contain nearly enough information. So we have now introduced a project page that contains real summary information about your project and a place that you can center your workflow rather than going back to the front screen.

New Look and Feel and Global Navigation

The first thing you will notice is the new look and feel - brighter, fresher, cleaner and more consistent use of highlighting colors. This is so much more 2018 than 2016 - such a long time ago.

The project tiles exist, in a cleaner layout, with easier filtering, and the project title is the link to take you to the new project screen.

Colors and Links

Throughout the interface you will see a number of consistent user interface elements and coloring:

Text like this and items in this colour are links to other pages and are used for navigation - clicking on one of these will take you to a new screen or page
Orange is used as a highlight colour consistently to grab your attention

Editing Things

if you have changes to save then you will see this button - clearly identified in yellow - and yes we moved the location of the Save Edits button on the Connection Information window!

if you see this button you know that you have no more changes to make

Global Navigation

We are not saying that the navigation wasn't perfect in the old interface but it was easy to find yourself in a perpetual loop going back through the home screen.

At the top of the screen you will see a "breadcrumb" that shows exactly where you are in the interface. This makes it easier to return to the project page and also the home page and know exactly where you will be going. Clicking on the logo in the top left corner still takes you back to the home page - just for old times sake.

In the Upper right you will find a new two new menus:

The User Profile Menu allows you to your login information and reset your password

The Help menu allows you to access the help center, documentation, version information as well as Legal information about using the Kitewheel Hub.

Project Page

There is a new Project Page is now the main page for dealing with all components of a project.

The main sections show the Project Name and Description and immediately below that the current deployments in your environments.

On the right hand side of the page are a whole series of major navigations and shortcuts to important things.

For more information on the new Project Page see the new documentation.

Metrics

Metrics are now directly linked to the Node instead of being viewed in the right hand panel. Nodes with associated metrics will have a graph icon on them. Upon clicking the icon you will be able to see the details of the metrics

Data Schema

The data schema has two usability enhancements.

The left and right arrows at the top of the Data Schema have been replaced with a tab structure for easy navigation between Schema, Public Variable and Literals.

The Data Schema is now half the width of the page so there is additional screen real estate to view and modify the Schema

Admin Pages

The Admin pages features three important updates.

The navigation inside of project has been streamlined for to improve usability. The submenu is now in horizontal tabs instead of in vertical buttons. This provides more screen real estate for the Admin options. Additionally, there is now a link to the Project Page and icons for all project links. This is designed for easy wayfinding.

The layout of the connections screen has been changed so that the Save and Test buttons are both at the bottom. This is to help users remember to Save the connection before testing it. The Test button will also be greyed out if there are unsaved changes.

[KIT-1176] - Remove Hardcoded Templates from the codebase
[KIT-1366] - Add doNoTrack options to Hub API Listener display
[KIT-1367] - Upgrade to Icon Library
[KIT-1395] - Create Database Connector Transaction Isolation Level Option
Password flow

Bugs

The user interface redesign has closed a lot of small user interface bugs and user experiences as well as the following bugs:

[KIT-1418] - Unable to add engine groups/stacks because of null S3Path
[KIT-1433] - Metric counts not pulled from rpt service for journey screenshots
[KIT-1434] - Metrics issues in hub
[KIT-1473] - Journey screenshots fail if they have more than 1 time based metrics graph open
[KIT-1524] - Email Connection Inline Help info link broken
[KIT-1550] - RPT metric errors related to 'prepared statement' and parameter count mismatches
[KIT-1251] - Alphabetize connections inside a REST adaptor node.
[KIT-1273] - A/B split test node documentation link broken
[KIT-1402] - JavaScript variable scope shared across organization level
[KIT-1441] - Conditional Node fails when property name contains a period
[KIT-1446] - Deployments Event Log not displaying in correct order
[KIT-1471] - Metrics are not accurately updated

Browser not supported