A fresh new look for the component overview page!

[#1]

Hi everyone! It’s Ra here from the Compass design team. 

We’re constantly working hard to improve the experience of our Compass users, and we’re excited to announce significant design changes to the component overview page based on your valuable feedback.

The component overview page provides a centralized view of a component’s key information to help teams understand and maintain it.

We believe the redesign will make discovering, organizing, and managing components faster and allow you to effortlessly find key information at a glance. Here are the key changes:

• Scorecards and Metrics are now closer together, helping you quickly gather insights about the component’s health with dynamic data from one place.

• All link types are relocated to the right sidebar. We’ve organized the links in a collective, scannable list providing high-level visibility into all of the component’s resources at a glance.

• Labels are now located higher on the page, so you can quickly view the component's categorization information.

• Overall usability enhancements for enhanced readability and legibility of component information.

As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please leave comments below. Check out our documentation to learn more about the overview page.

Many thanks!

Ra

[Jan-Hendrik Spieth]

Thanks for sharing the news, @Ra Kang!

I feel a bit unsure about the content of the sidebar, and specifically having the link types, and also the documentation, in there.

Some links are really important for certain components. Documentation link to confluence would be one of them. For others, a web/login link might be "primary" info.

Specifically about documentation links (to confluence), the description field and the Confluence documentation go hand-in-hand, for me. (In fact, I feel an urge to "embed" a Confluence page as description, to avoid duplication and maybe also because the description field has no formatting options.)

Similarly, you could say that Dashboard really relate to metrics and scorecards very much. Why demote the dashboards to the sidebar?

Jira issues also show weblinks and Confluence links in the main window, and below the description.

Another disadvantage of links in the sidebar is that they're oftentimes cut off because width does not suffice.

Having "primary" info (like documentation or primary web link) in the sidebar looks wrong to me. Wrong as in, "out of sight", easy to overlook, hard to spot, etc.

But maybe my current understanding/use of Compass just doesn't align with the Atlassian team's plan - it seems the focus is all on scorecards and metrics.

And the more I think about it, the more I get a feeling I'm asking for customization options for component screens. Because, to give another example, a custom field might be *very* important. But custom fields are the last info, down in the sidebar. Kind of the spot for the least important info ...

Hope this helps :-)

[Andrew Freedman]

Cheers @Jan-Hendrik Spieth! We really appreciate the quality feedback.

Working backwards, I think your conclusion that screen customisation is going to be a big help is definitely true. We think that customisation is something we'll want to offer, although it's not yet certain when we'll be ready to do that.

On the relative position of scorecards & metrics vs links, I think of it like this: links are "slow moving" data. Once they're set they typically stay the same for a long period of time. There's an impost on the user to learn where in the UI the link they need is, but once they're over that hump they can track down the right link pretty easily and be on their way.

Scorecards & metrics are "fast moving" data. Every time you open a component's overview page those features should show you something new. Having the extra space for these features will help us make them more useful and make it easier for the user to locate and understand the new information they're receiving.

That's the gnarly decision, but you also had some great, additional feedback:

• Component description & Confluence embeds/rich text editing — I love this idea, adding it to the backlog, thank you.
• Links with insufficient width in the sidebar — we recently launched our PagerDuty integration which takes the standard "On-call" link and replaces it with a new On-call panel. We really like this pattern wherein a simple link can be enhanced to an embedded UI which optimises the available information & interactions. We want to do more of these.

Oh, and I mustn't forget, as always we'd love to hear more from you on this and any other Compass topic. Feedback like yours truly is the lifeblood of our product decisions; we'll take it whenever and however! Comment here in the Community, share through our in-product chat or pick a time that suits for a face-to-face over Zoom.

— Andrew

[Jan-Hendrik Spieth]

Thanks @Andrew Freedman for the interesting reply! When it comes to slow moving vs fast moving component data - I totally get the idea. We have just started experimenting with Compass and most of our data so far is of the slow moving kind - basic component meta data. Our perspective might shift lateron, when we set up some metric etc.