We are pleased to announce the updated user interface for PactFlow. Beautiful, simple, intuitive, and blazing fast, the new user experience is optimized around our recommended best practices.
Background
PactFlow evolved from the open-source Pact Broker. The original Pact Broker experience was built around the core concept of an "integration," which made sense at the time as we only supported Pact, a consumer-driven model where all contracts are aware of their counterparts.
Over the years, PactFlow has transformed into a feature-rich solution, including expanding the types of contract testing we support. For example, in bi-directional contract testing, we may not know both sides of the integration, yet we had to fit it into an integration-focused view. This approach also complicated the presentation of verification results, matrix, and compatibility information.
We've also introduced new concepts like branches, environments, deployments, and automation tools like can-i-deploy and can-i-merge. Presenting these within an integration-centric view led to multi-step user journeys.
Additionally, our design was inconsistent with other SmartBear API products. As we work towards our API Hub vision, our products must be tightly integrated to form a seamless developer experience.
With these challenges in mind, we decided to rethink the design from first principles.
A shift in perspective
Central to our vision is a shift to an application-centric, rather than integration-centric, view. Developers work on applications, and tools like GitHub and CI systems revolve around applications. By making the application the focal point of our product, we align better with the developer workflow and simplify connections to other products in the ecosystem.
Introducing the new UI
The new UI offers a beautiful, simple, intuitive, and blazing fast user experience, optimized around our recommended best practices. It retains all the key features you love, with some special additions:
- Application-Centric View: Focus on the application you’re working on.
- Workflow Integration: Deeper integration with key tools like can-i-deploy.
- Simplified Navigation: Quick access to application versions, integrations, and deployability.
- Improved Design: Enhanced usability and accessibility (WCAG 2.2).
- Light and dark theme support: one of the most requested UI additions is in!
- More Changes: Additional details and our migration guide can be found here.
Available Now
The new UI is now available to all customers on our SaaS plans and is the default experience. You can continue switching back to the old UI for now, but stay tuned for our announcement on when it will be decommissioned.
On-premises customers will see this introduced in the coming months.
