Design and Web team summary – 8 November 2019

This was the final iteration before our roadmap sprint where we plan our 20.04 work.  Here are some of the highlights of our completed work.

Web squad

Web is the squad that develop and maintain most of the brochure websites across the Canonical.

New content

We created a takeover and landing page a Kata Containers webinar and published a case study outlining Wellcome Sanger’s use of Ceph.

We create two new pages; one for our Ceph storage offering and another for our partner Dell EMC.

Simplified resource pages

Our AB testing led to a redesign of our engage pages. By removing the navigation on them we found that users were more engaged with our content.

Ubuntu Advantage dashboard

We build and published the new advantage dashboard. It an exciting milestone as it involved the integration of SSO on ubuntu.com for the first time. This could open the door to more logged in experiences on our main site.

Brand

The Brand squad work closely with all other squads to deliver a consistent quality experience across all media and channels.

Events

We worked closely with the Marketing team on a number of event booths and collateral across the globe.

Slide Deck 2.0

After the analysis stage the slide deck has been stripped back, simplified and been rebuilt into Google slides. It will be released soon along with instructions for use and a toolkit of elements to use within the deck.

UI icons

We have progressed from the research phase into the discovery phase of the UI icons. We are developing a new style and system for the creation of the icons that will be used across all of our products to give a modern, consistent experience to our users.

Base

Base is the team that underpins our toolsets and architecture of our projects. They maintain the CI and deployment of all websites we maintain. 

Improving internal tooling 

Moved manager.assets.ubuntu.com into kubernetes, and ported the application behind it

to Flask.

Templating kubernetes configurations

There has been some work going on to template our kubernetes configurations, so we can easily rollout updates across every project, by having them share the same configuration templates.

Reducing the size of docker images

Updated docker files across team’s projects in order to produce smaller images.

MAAS

The MAAS squad develop the UI for the maas project.

As this was the last iteration before the end-of-cycle Product Sprint, we focused on completing all the outstanding items – finishing up the separation of MAAS-core and MAAS-UI, adding NUMA final details to non-summary pages, and adding link speed filters to the machine listing. We also fixed a number of outstanding bugs.

In addition, we started work on our plan for integration testing of the new UI project and a proof of concept for the implementation of the harness. 

JAAS

The JAAS squad develops the UI for the JAAS store and Juju GUI  projects.

JAAS dashboard

The team worked hard on creating a proof of concept which can be demoed and tested. We also continued to iterate designs based on feedback.

Charmhub

We created some further iterations of wireframes and visual designs. This included new versions of the home, store, search, charm and bundle detail pages.

Juju.is

We have begun developing the new website for the Juju project. All the infrastructure is in place and the new site should be released shortly. The site will contain information about Juju, plus Juju documentation and a number of Juju tutorials.

Vanilla

The Vanilla squad design and maintain the design system and Vanilla framework library. They ensure a consistent style throughout web assets.

Menu button component

We’ve added a new menu button component to our library. It was being used in two of our Cloud applications so it was proposed to be added upstream into Vanilla. 

Blog

We want to improve engagement and let users know what’s happening in Vanilla, as we continue to build a folio of posts it would be good to have a section to display blog articles and link to our design blog. You can see our latest posts by visiting https://vanillaframework.io/

Documentation updates

We’ve made a range of updates to our documentation site including better-written usage of components, added accessibility feature to icons, address the max-width inside the framework. But most importantly we now have added a section showing `@include` snippet per component, saving time for users to look in the .scss file and hunting to find the exact include for that particular component.

Button with icon component

We’ve made a number of fixes to our button with icon component so that any icon used isn’t misaligned, you can apply any button class desired and you now have the ability to have the icon standalone, or to the left and right with text.

Snapcraft

The Snapcraft team work closely with the snap store team to develop and maintain the snap store website.

Trending badges

As a first step in showing which Snaps are trending in the current week, we’ve enabled badges for publishers to use on their websites. The trending badge is independent of the Snap badge and only shows publicly if the Snap is trending.

A lot of work went into the backend to enable this flag – we’re monitoring the stats and when we’re comfortable that things are working 100% we’ll be rolling out some updates to the store.

As a publisher you can find your Snap badges when logged in under the Publicise section of a Snap on snapcraft.io. As always we welcome your feedback.

RHEL distro pages

We’ve also added Snap install instructions for Red Hat Enterprise Linux to our roster.

For while you’ve been able to scroll to the bottom of a Snap page and click through to see how to install the Snap on your distro, but now if you’re an enterprising type, you can follow along too.