Web Application Redesign: What’s Changed and What’s on the Roadmap

You might’ve noticed that a few months ago, we slowly started to introduce changes to our visual communication. Our logo was refreshed, and the website got redesigned. All those actions (and more that you might have missed) are part of a greater plan to align our brand with how we want people to perceive Neptune. 

We want Neptune to reflect better that we are a modern and user-friendly company solely focused on making your job as a data scientist or ML engineer easier. 

But we don’t want to stop on a fresh coat of paint and new branding for the website. So today, we want to talk more about what we think the future for Neptune as a tool should look like.

A few months ago, we started working on a plan to restructure and redesign our app. Under the hood, we’re continuously working on making Neptune even more flexible and adding support for new data types. And we want the application to keep pace with these changes.

Our goal is to make all the mundane daily tasks easier and quicker to perform. 

• Make the navigation faster, with fewer clicks, to achieve the same outcomes you do today. 
• Make the way you log your data and visualize it feel instantaneous. 
• Have a more configurable product that better suits your needs.

We planned quite a lot of changes, so we decided to split the implementation into two phases. Let’s take a closer look at them.

Phase 1 – Navigation redesign and view modes

The first set of changes will transform how you navigate the interface. We’ve moved project, workspace, and user account management to the sidebar. You can hide it once you enter the project to maximize the space for your work.

This change gave us some extra vertical space that we used to introduce view modes to the Run metadata section (and soon the model metadata section). We wanted to surface run and model version navigation so that you always have it at hand.

Thanks to that change, you can jump between single runs, viewing their metadata at the same time. It’s also much easier to quickly compare many runs—whether it’s looking at parameters on the runs table or comparing more complex data using dashboards.

The toolbar is now collapsible, and we’ve polished the runs table. The table column header actions are now grouped into one menu, and the run ID column is simplified.

And finally, the visual language of the UI is changing to match our other branding efforts. We want to make the web app look more modern and go hand-in-hand with the functional value that Neptune gives you.

We are not stopping here. It’s the first part of the changes we have in store. View modes will enable us to redesign and streamline another part of the web interface.

Phase 2 – Redesigning dashboards

We see that custom dashboards are very valuable for Neptune users. 

But currently, you need to create a separate dashboard for a single run and another one for when you’re comparing multiple runs. We want to change that and unify both types. 

Switching from a dashboard of a particular run to the data context of multiple compared runs will be quick and seamless. 

In order to do that, a dashboard must be defined as a collection of fields that can be shared among runs. To distinguish the new solution from the old dashboards and widgets system, we call the new design Boards & Tiles. 

What will also change is how you add content to your boards. We wanted this to require minimal effort from the user. That’s why you’ll be able to create boards not only in a manual way but also automatically.

For boards to be created in an automatic way, all you need to do is to specify the namespaces of your metadata structure or attributes of fields you want your boards to contain. 

This way, all new data logged to Neptune that meet the requirements of the given board will appear on it automatically. And all the configuration of what data goes to what board is in the hands of users.

Conclusion

The changes are major, and there’s no easy way to introduce them. But we’ll do our best to make the transition smooth. Today we are opening the beta version of the new user interface to all Neptune users. You can switch to the new UI right away. 

For now, it includes all the changes from phase 1. And we’re really looking forward to the feedback from our users! Let us know what you think, what you like and dislike about the changes, any bugs that you find, and all your ideas for improvements—it will help us a lot. 

After switching all our users to the new UI, we’ll start working on phase 2, and we hope to deliver it soon. We’ll keep you updated!