New UI Adoption Info
With the new UI, some work might be required to adapt to the new visual style and design guidelines. This can range from minor fixes such as adjustment of margins or tweaking of colors, to larger efforts such as recreating icons / visual assets, or redesigning the layout to adhere to industry standards.
The scope of work should be assessed on a case by case basis, ideally with the help of UX expertise, however the typical work required include:
- Review the new design guidelines
- Identify adoption work and create design plan
- Create visual assets
- Make the code changes and update icons
Regardless of your decision on the scope of planned UI changes, you are always required to perform basic migration to the latest CET major version.
What is the difference between adoption and migration?
- Basic Migration refers to the mandatory effort that partners perform every release to update their code to work in the new major version according to the Migration Guide, regardless of old or new UI. For example, code changes, compile errors, bugfixes.
- Adoption of new UI refers to the optional effort to rework the extensions to fit the new design guidelines. e.g. Update partner extension component libraries to comply to the new guidelines with new icons.
Configura's plan on the transition of old UI to the new UI is outlined in the diagram above. It is up to the partner to plan and decide the cadence of their updates.
It is important to note that partners can decide on the cadence of their updates, so they can decide to work on and release the new UI changes anytime between September 2024 to May 2025.
Suggested Adoption Timeline:
- 15.0: New UI adoption remains optional, however partners should try out the new UI and review any potential work.
- 15.5 (November 2024): Configura recommends partners to start adopting the new UI. This means:
- Before August - partners should plan ahead to review changelog and the new UX Design Guidelines, and identify necessary adoption work.
- September (Feature Freeze) - review BETA changelog, update the plan for necessary migration and perform adoption work.
- 16.0 (May 2025): Configura plans to phase out the old UI, so adoption of new UI should occur beforehand.
Should I support the old UI? Do I need to maintain two versions of my extensions?
While Configura will still maintain necessary functionality for the old UI, the old UI will be deprecated after 16.0 (May 2025), and New UI is the future. While the transition period is ongoing, if you have an existing old UI toolbox, we recommend to maintain two versions of the toolbox, but any new work is expected to target the new UI. It is also acceptable if you do not want to maintain the old UI anymore and go all in with the new UI, as new UI toolboxes will work in the old UI (albeit imperfectly, with a tighter spacing in its layout).
Here are some estimates for effort it takes to adopt the new UI for partner toolboxes on a varying level of compliance, based on internal investigation, however it may vary significantly depending on the factors outlined below.
The estimate is affected by these general factors:
- How much customized functionalities there are
- UI/UX understanding
- Availability of a designer or UX expertise
- Availability of visual resources
- Ambition level / product vision / budget
- Time to review the guidelines / migration guide
- How the extension is set up (subextensions, multiple toolboxes, catalog/data-driven toolboxes)
- Technical expertise available
Engaging a designer to review usability and creation of the new icons may be the most time consuming part.
It is up to the partner to plan and decide the cadence of their updates.
We are still collecting data to update our estimates and continuously improve the framework to make it easier to adopt, so any feedback is much appreciated.
Debug Option: Force Facelift Style
There's a new "Force Facelift Style" debug option provided in the Release Debug menu which will attempt an imperfect automatic conversion of your toolbox to the new look, to aid in estimating the amount of effort needed and planning.
Technical details are available in the 15.5 Migration Guide.
Guidelines for testing is available in the 15.5 QA Testing Guide.
Changelog for what's changed
