Inside the Vision for SingleStore's New Portal Navigation

Why we needed to redesign the Portal’s navigation

As we continue to add new features to our cloud offering, our existing navigation struggled to scale accordingly. We had outgrown the information architecture model, and needed to revisit how things fit together.

Additionally, we had been tracking feedback from customers on the existing interface and took this opportunity to address pain points and redefine our core user audience. Our goal was to create a foundation for the evolution of SingleStore as a data platform — and highlight the workflows of our core power users.

Our vision and goals

It’s inevitable when people hear a redesign is in progress, everyone has their own opinion and complaint they would like to see resolved. It's why redesigns take so long to get off the ground and tend to balloon in size. To keep scope down and the project focused, we identified several goals to direct the path of our design explorations and prioritize the phasing of this project.

Design a scalable navigation scheme that is flexible and prepared for future product releases

• Our roadmap is jam packed with new features and capabilities for our users. We made sure to leave room for our growth as a data platform, including our plans to offer more data services later this year!
• We conducted a tree-test and tested our proposed information architecture to identify groupings of features and rules for where new features should be placed based on users’ mental models.

Augment core user workflows for admins and developers

• Historically, Portal has largely been a place for admins to manage their databases. And while we’ve continued to focus on admins as a core persona, we wanted to introduce an additional focus on a different user profile — the developer. With the introduction of Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC), Notebooks  and Free Shared Tier, we hope to entice users to use Portal to query their database, develop apps and do more than just manage their database.
• As we continued to expand what developers can do in Portal, we needed to avoid cluttering the interface with features that the respective persona may not use. We focused on giving easy access to the features that each persona will need most of the time and ways we could empower their workflows to be more efficient.

Establish clarity on objects and their relationships to help orient users

• Our product can be a little complex, with multiple layers of hierarchy and relationships between our databases and deployments. On our roadmap are plans to add more objects, meaning more complexity. A continued pain point we heard from existing users was confusion on the relationships between objects.
• We wanted to make sure our proposed designs and naming conventions would match users’ inherent mental models and balance innovation in our space while keeping to expectations built upon industry standards.

What to expect

As users try out the new navigation, we encourage them to rethink how they use SingleStore as a whole. Some highlights of this first phase include:

Collapsible sidebar. Collapse the sidebar to give yourself more room to write queries and develop apps.

Data Studio Schema Explorer. Look up tables and views without leaving your notebook or SQL editor.

Universal deployments dropdown. Selecting a deployment in any of the Monitoring or Deployments pages will persist across these pages.

Launching a redesign is risky and comes at a cost to the goodwill of our users. We’ll be launching this slowly and providing users with a way to switch back and ease their way into the changes. Stay tuned for more changes on the way…

Curious to see Portal changes in SingleStore? Start free today.