Introducing the New Confluent Cloud Homepage UI: Enhancing User Experience

At Confluent, we are committed to enhancing our product to meet the evolving needs of our customers. In the last year we've seen substantial increases in both UI users and UI usage. With such high growth, we've been looking for ways to improve experiences where we can. Based on internal and external validation, the Confluent Cloud Homepage was specifically identified as an area that could be improved. Given that it is the first point of interaction for many users, we saw an opportunity to refine the experience and make it more intuitive and user-friendly.

Modern design and UX principles guided this redesign. We focused on creating a clear, intuitive, and consistent experience that aligns with what our customers want to achieve on a streaming platform. This meant understanding our users' needs through collecting qualitative and quantitative data, conducting UX research, and continuously validating our assumptions with real user feedback. We want to empower users to be self-sufficient, by providing workflows that support their expertise and allow them to extract maximum value from their data with minimal friction.

In the redesign, we emphasized improved wayfinding, ensuring users can quickly navigate to the tasks they need to accomplish. The new UI provides more relevant and actionable information immediately upon arrival in the Confluent console, significantly enhancing usability and productivity for our large and growing user base.

At a high level, we made improvements in the following areas:

• Understand

• Pick up where you left off

• Discover more

• Learn more

Let's take a closer look at some of the new Homepage capabilities.

Understand

To help users understand their deployment better, we tweaked the Confluent Overview to make sure that every resource aligns to a user journey (no dead ends). Now, for the first time, you can click on the Clusters or Topics overview and see a modal with all Clusters/Topics you have access to in a single place. Once the Cluster/Topic modal is open, you can search for specific resources by environment name/id, cluster name/id, or topic name.

For resources where health status is available, we added improved health indicators to show error (red diamond), warning (orange triangle), and healthy (green circle) status symbols.

Pick up where you left off

The new Favorites and Recently visited resources tiles on the Homepage are designed to enhance user experience by providing quick access to frequently used and/or favorite resources. Our goal is to streamline navigation and improve engagement by allowing users to easily pick up where they left off whenever possible. For example, you can now add favorite resources directly to your Homepage, and recently visited resources will also appear automatically as you visit more resources.

Discover more

The Discover data tile on the new Homepage UI allows users to easily discover, explore, and access newly created Apache Kafka® topics on Confluent Cloud. It provides a summary of recently created or modified topics, with an Explore more link that redirects users to the Data Portal for further exploration.

The Data access requests tile displays recent requests from users in the Data Portal, allowing admins to quickly review requests and grant/deny access.

The Recommended actions tile contains recommendations and configuration options to help customers more easily build their data streaming infrastructure. New tutorials, calls to action, or important informational updates will also be added to this tile. New items will appear at the top of the list, but you can always click View all to see the entire list of recommendations.

Learn more

When talking to customers many of them are unaware of recent product launches, pricing changes, or feature/policy updates. Many of these changes are announced on the official Confluent Blog. The Blogs tile on the new Homepage is designed to keep users informed and up to date with the latest feature launches, policy changes, and case studies from Confluent, ensuring customers have easy access to our world-class team of writers and field experts, who are continuously putting together amazing content about building data streaming applications and platforms.

Conclusion

As you can see, we've gone from a relatively information-sparse Homepage to a richer experience that helps users find what they need and accomplish what they want with ease.

Old Homepage

New Homepage

This new Confluent Cloud Homepage UI is more than just an update; it's a reflection of our vision to create a more intuitive, efficient, and engaging platform. As we continue to innovate, we are committed to listening to your feedback and making continuous improvements.

We have more enhancements in the pipeline that we think will further enrich your experience with Confluent. Stay tuned for more updates, and happy streaming!

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