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Innovation

OctoPerf v13.1 - Jira, variable queues, recorder and new UI improvements

Our New user interface has kept us busy for a while now, which explains why we haven't made an update post like this one in a while. You've probably noticed that the UI has changed a lot since the first version released last year. It's obvious when you put them side by side.

The beta version:

octoperf-new-ui-overview

And the latest:

octoperf-new-ui-latest

A lot of it had to do with updating to Angular 15 but this was also the perfect occasion to offer an even better user experience. The look and feel will continue to evolve as we integrate new features, feedbacks and bugfixes but we're proud to say that the bulk of it is behind us now.

OctoPerf's new UI - Design changes

This article is the second in a series of overviews of our new UI. You can find the first one here.

This time we will dive into the changes we've made in the design phase. We've addressed many pain points from the old UI that we want to detail here:

This will make the design in OctoPerf even faster, so that you can focus more time on your tests and analyzing them.

Create virtual user

The first item on the list is obviously the new virtual user creation process. A lot of people were confused by the older UI and used the menus to get back to the project level when what they really wanted was to get back to the last step. Of course the fact that you are now required to click on Back / Next to move to the another step of the process requires one more interaction but it's also a lot easier to understand what's going on since it results from your actions. We think it's the right way to go since the only drawback is adding a couple of clicks on a process that is only used a few times per project.

To make things easier for beginners, the contextual documentation will display as soon as you select any option. It's also a better use of horizontal space that would otherwise be lost:

Back

OctoPerf's new UI - Overview changes

Our new UI has been available for everyone since a few weeks now. It is a major project for us that has taken several years to get to this stage. It's been a lot of effort but we're confident that it will be worth it when you see all the new possibilities.

That being said, we thought it would be helpful to ease you into it by going through some of the key features together. The goal is to talk about the major UI changes that impact most if not all the new screens. Then we'll cover the specifics of each individual steps (like design or runtime) in later blog posts.

Of course the first thing that comes to mind is the navigation through OctoPerf. And we've made a lot of changes in this area.

Left-handed menu

Left hand menu

The top menu has become a left-handed menu now. We've always been trying to keep up with properly adding the new features in the menus like we did last year. But we thought it could be improved further. Typically, we noticed that new users struggled to notice what's inside the workspace menu so we decided to split it into another "Tools" submenu.

Workspace and projects remain visible at all times in order to navigate back to their level easily. It can also be collapsed in order to save horizontal space once you are familiar with the layout and icons.