Redesigning CloudFlare

CloudFlare’s original interface grew at an amazing speed. Visually, it hadn't changed much since CloudFlare’s launch in 2010. After several years of new features, settings, and ancillary UIs buried beneath clicks, it became clear that the user experience was lacking and would only get worse as we continued to add features. The question became: How could we make a UI that was versatile, scalable, and consistent?

If you haven’t yet, make sure you read Matthew’s post about the philosophy behind our new interface. This post will go into the details and the thought process behind designing our new dashboard.

Why a redesign?

We needed versatility for a growing variety of users and devices

As CloudFlare has grown, we now have a large variety of customers spanning four very different plan levels. We needed an interface that would work well for both the casual owner of a single blog, an agency managing many client sites, and enterprise customers that demand ultimate control. Also, the rise of responsive design was something we wanted to take seriously — the dashboard should be versatile enough to work just as well on every device.

We needed a platform that we could build upon

We couldn’t Continue reading