Headline:
Modernize the user interface and/or provide options to allow a custom UI.
Description:
As a service provider, we’re looking to provide the best user experience possible for our customers. We provide managed VMware platforms, backup as a service, DR as a service and more and taking disparate functions and putting them together is what we do best. With Morpheus, being able to add hyperscale and remote platforms to the mix makes for an incredibly powerful story, but we run into a lot of challenges with the UI because it can be an overwhelming thing to navigate. Most of our customers are traditional IT administrators and many don’t have the time to learn a completely new interface with a new nomenclature when they just want to get things done.
Currently Morpheus has two options: The Standard view and the Service Catalog view. You can make permissions changes in the Standard view to cut back on the number of available options, but there’s still quite a lot to navigate. The Service Catalog view is too simple and has a key blocker in that if one admin deploys something, the other admins can’t see it. It’s not built to be that, and forcing admins to try to use it makes things worse. Building a persona/interface in the middle or having an option to build a custom UI that fits in the middle would be immensely helpful.
The other issue is that the current UI is very dated. Top bar and tab navigation is clunky and is basically burying everything a level deeper than it should be. All of my clients want to see the list of their virtual machines (not instances). That’s under Provisioning → Instances. Being able to pull that up to a top level or highlight it more prominently would ease the learning curve that Morpheus puts forth. Moving the navigation to the left of the screen would also help with Morpheus’ use of white space. Once a window is wider than a certain point, it’s just pure white space. Use that more effectively!
I’ve made a photoshopped version of the UI below. The idea is to link things on the left to existing pages in Morpheus (ex. Virtual Machines goes to the Instances page).
By doing this, Morpheus can allow for a level of simplification without giving up the power the platform has.
I’d love to help make this happen!
Example/Use case(s):
