Project Overview, wasted space

My support question is about making the project overview screen more effective / space efficient.

My team manage a project that contains a number of channels and a number of environments, we do not use the octopus’s method of multi tenancy

In the attached image there are 4 areas I would like to discuss.

The orange box show a channel where there are no environments that this user is allowed to deploy to (restricted by permissions). The system correctly hides all the environments, but still shows the channel and takes up a lot of screen space. In my case I have 4 channels that this user cannot use, (the screen shot only shows the 1 redundant one) but it is much more of a pain in real life.

The green box shows a large amount of dead space, This means I need to scroll right (a pain) particularly when there is plenty of spare space on the screen.

The red box shows the version number for the release. This seems totally redundant as that information is always the same on that row.

The blue box shows the channel. This seems even more pointless as this entire table can only be for that channel.

Both the red and blue box just introduce “noise” and take up valuable screen space.

I know you probably have a mountain of things to develop, but this seems like an easy win. All you would need to do is remove redundant items and make the spacing better. My team would appreciate if you could resolve this issue. We love octopus, but this is the landing screen for most of my team and it sets a very bad impression from their “deployment teams” perspective.

Thanks

Hi Paul,

Thanks for getting in touch and thanks for taking the time to send us this detailed feedback.

You’re correct. In order to solve some performance problems for customers operating at scale, we introduced virtual scrolling to our dashboards recently (to improve rendering time). However, this caused some negative effects that we’re still working towards improving, one of which is the fixed-width of the cells that causes all that unnecessary whitespace.

We’re also trying to do too many things with these dashboard cells. I.e. Making them work the same way across channels and multi-tenancy layouts, which as you’ve pointed out, adds unnecessary noise and causes distraction if you’re not using multi-tenancy.

Unfortunately there are no quick wins, because these layouts are catering for so many different scenarios and there’s a high risk of knock-on effects to any minor UI change in these dashboards (I’ve learned this the hard way) :slight_smile:

That said, our performance team is looking at making the virtual scrolling an opt-in feature, and we’ll also look into those other improvements from a usability point-of-view and make sure this gets sorted with priority (since this is a cause of frustration).

We have created a GitHub issue here that you can track to be notified when a fix is available.

Cheers
Mark

Thanks for your reply.

I understand that the system has a wide userbase and everyone uses it slightly differently, but I hope that my suggestions can make their way into an improved version that everyone can benefit from.

I will keep an eye on the issue.

Keep up the good work.