What do you think of the new UI?

  • 23 August 2022
  • 7 replies
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As a Contentstack ‘superuser’ since mid-2019, i have been heavily involved with building and designing schema. That also means i’ve used the old UI a fair amount vs the new UI. 

I’d be interested to know if people have been using the new UI, what they like and what they think could be improved. Are there are any tricks you have encountered you would be willing to share?


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It took a lot of getting used to, but I’ve finally found myself using it exclusively when building my latest project. 

The two biggest problems I have with the UI are: 

  • The new Menu structure is more confusing to new users. Previously I could have them landing on a Home Page which lists the Content Types, they could see ‘Pages’ or ‘Articles’ where I’d normally send them and they’d then see a list of those entries. And the option to create a new Entry was purely for that Content Type. That same journey is more confusing now as it exposes them to more information than they’d typically need. Maybe the solution is for me to lock down their access rights a bit more to limit what they see?
  • When creating an Entry, the data on the page has been condensed and there’s not enough visual separation between elements. The old UI had blocks that were different colours from the background and it gave you the visual cue that you were within an element. Now everything is white, an expanded modular block blends in with the rest of the page.

Both of these things are issues I’ve gotten used to and become less of a problem with time as I get more familiar with the UI. I recognise it’s an iterative process though, and have been encouraging my team to use it more and provide their own feedback to help with that process.

@Richard Mace appreciate your feedback. We’re working on a few things to improve the experience. 

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We experienced a lot of the same issues as already written above and actually changed the CSS ourselves to bring back a little of the block structure from the old design to be able to separate everything.

Apart from that we had a issue with a lot of our titles being cut off here and there. One place was when we embedded content types we couldn’t see which one to pick because the ending was missing. When the embedded content type was showing in the rich text editor we had the same issue. Our solution was to make all of the content wider in general.

I have added 2 pictures of how our Contentstack looks like now in case some Contentstack employees would be interested 😀

 

 

 

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Hey @Mark Nygaard 

Thanks so much for sharing this.  We actually have been working on an updated design for the entry editor that brings it a lot closer to what you have done with the CSS there and I think fixes a lot of the readability feedback that we have gotten.

Would you be up for doing a quick review with our design team to look at what we have come up with?  You have obviously spent some time thinking about it and I think you’d be a great asset to validate our design and give some feedback.

Cheers, 

Conor

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@Mark Nygaard - just out of interest, how did you go about changing the CSS for the Contentstack UI, is there any documentation you could point me to?

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@Richard Mace I have answered you in private about this.

It sounds like Contentstack have some changes coming soon so I won’t encourage people to override the CSS and mess up future updates.

@Mark Nygaard  100% agree with you.  I enjoy much of the new UI with the exception of the block structure.  It’s difficult to update fields or even content at times due to getting “lost” in the sections and unable to find where I am.

@ConorEgan definitely can’t wait for CSS update!

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