Design and Web team summary – 20 April 2018

Welcome to the latest work and updates from the design and web team.

We manage all web projects across Canonical – from www.ubuntu.com to the Juju GUI we help to bring beauty and consistency to all the web projects.

MAAS

Table consistency and improvements

MAAS UI contains a lot of data in tables, posing an interesting design challenge. We have been working through each table in the MAAS UI and making the styling and iterations consistent. This includes making the actions in tables being uniform on all tables and improving the readability on small screens.

User tests

We have conducted a number of user-experience interviews with Design, IS, Field and Engineering, and have many findings, which are been processed. This work will lead to near-term improvements and contribute to the long-term vision of the application.

Snaps and snapcraft

Coming soon: publisher pages on snapcraft.io

We have been working hard on testing the publisher pages. We’ve been testing our work this week and hope to release soon.

This will be a new area on snapcraft.io where publishers can log in to update the public details about their snaps, and view usage data.

As well as shoring up our integration tests, each squad member was assigned a set of scenarios to run through in the new section. We’ve found and fixed 69 issues, ready for a public release sometime soon.

Watch this space!

Web

Bionic Beaver updates to the websites

We’ve been busy working on updating the copy, images and links across www.ubuntu.com in the lead up to the 18.04 LTS release. This work has involved reaching out to all the product teams to make sure all the information is up-to-date on the site.

Download redesign

As part of the Bionic Beaver work we have taken the opportunity to redesign the download section of the website.

Vanilla and core work

360 reviews project

Internally to the company we are developing tooling to help employee reviews. We have been working on developing a proof of concept.

Development Vanilla framework v1.7.0-beta

We have been heavily testing the current beta release of version 1.7.0 in the lead up to the beta-2 release coming out next week. Over 40 issues were discovered and fixed. The 1.7.0 release is becoming more and more solid and when released will have a number of significant improvements.

cn.ubuntu.com resilience on Kubernetes

Since we moved cn.ubuntu.com into our Kubernetes cluster, we’ve been keeping an eye on the traffic, and how the new platform is managing the load. We have made a number of observations and have some ideas for optimisations that we hope to publish more about in the near future.

Branding

Booth graphics

We’ve designed booth graphics for the “Dell Tech World” event happening in Las Vegas on the 30th of April. We also made some ODS event stand graphics for ODS which is happening in Vancouver in May.

Snapcraft t-shirt

We also designed the new Snapcraft t-shirt which will be given out in the Berlin sprint.

Documentation

After the Download page, some of the highest traffic pages on the Ubuntu website are the tutorials. As well as publishing new tutorials we also like to make sure that the existing ones are still meeting user expectations (mainly through the built in feedback) and are up to date.

These last few weeks have seen quite a bit of activity on updating some of the most popular tutorials (usually ones around installing Ubuntu or making USB sticks) to reflect the changes in the 18.04 desktop. Sure, we have known for two years that this release was coming – but it is also rather tricky to write instructions and do screenshots of things before they are finished! We also needed to preserve and tweak older tutorials (it is still okay to burn a DVD on 16.04) while making sure that the default ones now reference Bionic.

If you haven’t visited the tutorials site, give it a try, you may find something useful, and we can always use more feedback.