Visual Studio Team Services in UI/UX Revamp -- Visual Studio Magazine

Visual Studio Team Services in UI/UX Revamp

By David Ramel
11/02/2017

The latest development sprint for Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) is short on new features but does tease a major revamp of the UI to improve the user experience.

"There's a bunch of nice stuff but not a lot that is earth shaking," admitted Brian Harry in an update post yesterday about sprint 125.

Rather, the VSTS team has been working on a revamp of the UI in order to address some UX degradation caused by continual additions to the cloud collaboration platform for agile development. Harry wasn't specific about what new features are in the works as part of the revamp, but promised to unveil them at the upcoming Connect(); conference.

According to the release notes, the Oct. 30 sprint sees several improvements to query editing capabilities and consistency, along with a new create release dialog. Other key features listed by Microsoft -- to be rolled out in the next few weeks -- include:

Circle avatars -- Out with the squares... in with the circles.
Modernized column options and Added support for Not In query operator -- Create more useful queries with ease.
Mention a pull request -- Discuss pull requests with a bang!
Consistent filtering in Plans and Package -- Find what you're looking for fast no matter where you are in VSTS.

"All of these are just small parts of an overall UI refresh we are in the middle of and will continue to iterate on every sprint for the next several," Harry said. "As our UI has grown, inconsistencies have multiplied. Nice user experience has suffered in the name of expediency to deliver new capabilities. We're trying to address that and converge back to a happy, consistent experience. Looking forward to continuing to make progress on this. Feedback on anything is always welcome but feedback on UX, right now, is particularly helpful."

The Connect(); conference, starting Nov. 15, is primarily an online event.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

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