Visual design
Below are a few suggestions on how I believe the visual design could be improved.
1) Make the search field in the menu bar a normal search field instead of having the field itself hidden behind the button and expand on request. It is much more discoverable if it looks like a search field.
2) In the device view, get rid of the tabs. Put all information on one page so it is all available as soon as you open the device view page. There is a lot of important information that is hard to find because you need to remember which tab is in.
3) In the device view, spend some time designing the data tables instead of just having them all the full page width and then expanding the cells. It is very cluttered to look at and it's hard to scan the tables because the cells are not aligned.
4) In the device view, it seems very strange that the most important space on the page is given to stating "This is not a network switch, this is not a FC switch, this is not a virtual host" instead of just listing what device type it is. It appears to have grown over time and now it takes up a lot of space. I generally find it strange to be able to select that a device can be a blade chassis, network switch and a virtual host all at the same time. Maybe it's time to update the data model, so the device type is defined at the beginning: server, network switch, chassis etc?
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Jens,
#1 is a good point regarding unhiding the search box by default.
For #2, We will look into the tab view vs an alternative as the page gets too big with all the info.
For #3 Can you please explain what do you mean by data tables here?
For #4, the reason type of device(physical, virtual, blade etc.) and the attributes like network switch, virtual host etc. are different because with all this modular design and software defined networking it is hard to contain all these attributes in a type now. For example, a virtual host can be a network switch or a blade device can be a virtual host.
Thanks.
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Ad 2) Why must the page be a certain size? I would much rather have it all in a single page - scrolling is very easy if you have a scroll mouse or a Page Down key on your keyboard. Switching between the tabs require that I mouse click on a small tab. Furthermore, putting information in tabs rather than on a single page, it is no longer possible to scan or even use browser search to find the piece of information you're looking for.
Ad 3) The data tables is the content in the tabs. Each tab looks like a single big table with rows with different number of cells.
Ad 3) Then at least hide the things the device is not. Display if something is clicked on, otherwise don't. It really is taking up a lot of screen space without providing value. I think it is a waste of space on the device view of all my servers to explicitly state that they are not fibre channel switches and they are not blade chassis. Also, I am a bit curious why there is no place I can actually select that a device is a server. Those are the ones I have the most of and I have no place to designate a device as a server. I just have to infer that when it is not a chassis, a switch etc., then it is a server.
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Jens, for #1 - Device tab - We have removed the click and replaced it with hover over for in v5.5.7: http://blog.device42.com/2014/01/system-generated-permission-groups-and-better-adldap-integration-with-v5-5-7/
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