Over the past few weeks, our team has written a lot about the Cloudflare for Teams Dashboard, and more specifically, about our approach to design and the content within it. In these recent posts, we charted the journey of developing omni-directional communication channels across product, design, and content, and how these relationships directly influence the user experiences we aim to create.
Today, we’re announcing a new feature within the Teams Dash. We called it “Home”. We created Home with a simple goal in mind: design an adaptive and informative landing page where users can see a round-up of their environment.
In this last post of our series, we’ll show, rather than tell, how we collaborated as a team that rows in the same direction and towards the same goal — to create a great user experience.
In this blog post, we’ll walk you through your new Teams Home by calling out a few of the guiding principles we had in mind as we designed it. Transparency, adaptiveness, guidance and warmth aren’t only foundational words in the Cloudflare for Teams product principles — they’re part of our day-to-day brainstorming and discussion around user experience.
Here’s how the Teams Home reflects these principles.
Transparency
What you’ll find in the new Teams Home is a single space to view your network and applications traffic. We wanted to build an experience that allows users to get a comprehensive view of all things protected by Teams — a single pane of glass that’s always available, and that users can quickly pull up to spot any anomalies in their network traffic. Or simply to keep it under control.
We’ve also made it simpler for you to keep an eye on user count, and added a direct link to our plans page should you need to make any changes to the subscription you’ve chosen.
The Teams Home brings all users signals into one view, threading together concepts that were once sparse across the Dash.
Warmth
We called it “Home,” because we wanted it to feel like a space you visit each day that brings you clarity and peace of mind. Too often, security products can feel clinical and stark, and we wanted to avoid that. Through the use of color theory and language analysis, we actively worked to convey a feeling of approachability, while still keeping the Dash functional and straightforward.
When writing for UX, we need to be considerate of a user’s emotions as they follow a given flow in our product. Some users may appreciate certain elements as they explore the dash on a not-so-busy day; other users may not if their environment is at-risk and they simply need to identify what’s wrong, fast.
With this in mind, we’ve sprinkled bits of conversational, friendly copy where appropriate. For example, the biggest textual element in the Home page is a greeting — consistent with the header in our Quick Start page (“Welcome aboard!”), the tone is designed to be cheerful and welcoming.
Another subtle example of this is our loading screen. Nobody likes to wait, so we wanted to build this interaction for our users as well. With an animation that brings in elements representative of Cloudflare’s network, and alternating lines of copy that refer to the semantics of building and cleaning a physical home, we wanted to add a quirky touch where it doesn’t interfere with what really matters.
Guidance
The Teams family has grown and expanded since its inception, and we wanted to highlight complementary features that are a key part of our user journeys. In the footer, you’ll find easy access to things like Cloudflare Radar, the Teams Help page, and a quick-start guide packed with simple starter packs. These additional features help craft a holistic picture of the Teams story.
In our product principles, we give great importance to ease of use. And we, as a team, have an ambitious goal in mind — make Zero Trust security principles approachable for everyone.
To us, a product is easy to use when it guides users to success through clear paths in the interface. This is why we’ve pre-established some of these paths — we want to help our users take their first steps within Teams. With just a few clicks from the Home and Quick Start pages, users who signed up primarily for Secure Web Gateway functionalities can add Zero Trust rules in front of their applications, and vice-versa.
We’ve also incorporated an entirely new approach to some of our empty states. Instead of just telling our users there’s no data to show, we help them take actions to start populating those empty charts.
Adaptiveness
As threats on the Internet evolve, so will the needs of our users. Throughout this process, we thought critically about how the Teams Home could be flexible in nature, and scale was a key priority. We’ll continue to ship new features — and when we do, those features will have a place in the Teams Home, in large part due to the modular approach we adopted. Moving forward, we will continue to add more data signals into the Teams Home and aim to put more control into your hands to customize your unique Home experience. We’re also integrating easier ways for you to give us feedback on the overall experience and are excited to learn more from our users.
Check it out today
The Teams Home is available today for all users on the Teams Dash. If you don’t have a Cloudflare for Teams account yet, click here to get started.
You’ll know you’re Home when you see the Welcome Page.