Puppet Labs
About
Puppet by Perforce helps companies automate IT management by defining systems as code, ensuring deployments stay consistent, secure, and up to date across any number of servers or environments.
Our Role
Our role in this redesign was UX/UI Design.
Puppet faced a major challenge with one of its most critical features in Puppet CD4PE (Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise): Pipelines. This feature powers the automation and deployment of infrastructure code, making it central to users’ workflows. Puppet came to us looking for new ways to improve the usability, scalability, and overall experience for their internal developers and external users who use the feature on a daily basis. The ultimate goal was to help deliver Puppet code more efficiently and reliably through the Pipelines user interface.
To successfully redesign Puppet’s Pipelines feature in CD4PE, we grounded the process in research. Through user interviews and stakeholder conversations, we uncovered needs, challenges, and workflow gaps. Complementing this with usability testing, we observed pain points and frustrations firsthand - insights that directly shaped our design decisions and revealed key opportunities for improvement.
Common pain points: 1. Complex UI: The Pipelines interface is overwhelming, especially for new users, with difficult navigation, configuration, and dependency management. 2. Integration Issues: Connecting Pipelines to version control, deployment, and monitoring tools is cumbersome, often requiring manual workarounds. 3. Performance Bottlenecks: Slow stage execution and resource-heavy processes cause deployment delays and reduced productivity. See image below of the old Pipelines Overview page as a reference to the pain points listed.
After rigorous testing, a deep understanding of our users, and addressing key pain points, we focused on critical areas of improvement: usability, scalability, flexibility, and integration. The redesign also modernized the Pipelines layout with new components such as sidebars, navigation, buttons, pipeline cards, and default pipeline templates. These updates significantly elevated the overall experience, making it easier and more intuitive for users to manage large-scale pipeline deployments with greater efficiency and far less confusion. Areas of improvement: 1. Usability: Improve the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) of the Pipelines feature to make it more intuitive, accessible, and efficient for users. 2. Scalability: Enhance the Pipelines feature to handle large-scale deployments and accommodate complex infrastructure environments. 3. Flexibility: Provide users with more options and configuration capabilities to customize their continuous delivery pipelines according to their specific needs. 4. Integration: Enable seamless integration with version control systems, deployment tools, and monitoring frameworks to facilitate end-to-end automation.
This new redesigned Pipelines feature showcases new components that give users more customization, accessibility and organization when creating a new pipeline. From the action buttons like Add Pipeline, Manage Pipelines or Add Default Pipeline, the user has a wide array of options to get started and not feel stuck when working on a deployment.
“The redesign of the Pipelines feature was a major shift in our deployment process and helped our developers and clients push code, add staging, and search for branch repos more efficiently.”
OWEN NEWMAN
SOFTWARE ENGINEER AT PUPPET
By addressing the problems and overcoming the associated challenges that so many internal and external users brought up, the redesigned Pipelines feature in Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise has enhanced the usability, scalability, flexibility, integration capabilities, and performance of the product. After the redesign, organizations like Porsche, New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and Walmart have been able to better streamline their continuous delivery processes, achieve faster and more reliable infrastructure code deployments, and ultimately more improved software delivery lifecycles.
