What is this UX/UI Redesign?
Sugar is implementing a customer-inspired, research-based redesign of the user interface and navigation. This redesign gives you more visual real estate, serving up more relevant data to your fingertips to help increase your productivity and accelerate goal achievements.
Here is a top level overview of the benefits to the UI changes:
- Reduced noise. Limiting the top navigation elements in the left Nav (rail) were easier to consume for user. WE heard that most average users navigate to 3 modules. Admins do use much more but the expanding drawer was identified as a convenient solution for them.
- Familiarity - Admins anticipate the alignment of the design with other tools their users work with daily will make Sugar more intuitive and comfortable. Particularly when onboarding new employees. Using common UI patterns means that new users can leverage existing knowledge making the application feel more intuitive.
- Search front and center - Search is a highly used feature for service agents and Sales reps to quickly get to a record. The new header design promotes this interaction. (admins mentioned the number of times they were surprised that their users asked how to search within Sugar even though the search is in the header today.
- Screen Real estate – This change keeps the overall content area very much the same. This is desirable for working in lists and our 2 column records. (Screen size/resolution will greatly impact the perceived value of this)
Who is affected by this change?
This redesign has a significant impact on day-by-day user experience. New navigation and positioning of elements are part of this change as well as customizations can be impacted and not displayed as users are used to currently.
Developers will be impacted by any customization in the following areas/components of Sugar:
- Header
- Footer (including Footer Logo)
- Quickcreate
- Quicksearch
Those areas suffered minimum to no impact in this redesign.
- Notifications
- Profile Dropdown
When is this happening?
Sugar’s new UI/UX update is coming in our next cloud release 12.3 (Q1 2023) planned for January 2023.
- End-users:
- Sugar has provided a sneak peek demo environment to experience the new User Interface and familiarize themselves with the new navigation prior upgrade.
- Developers:
- Sugar will release a preview as per our cadence by mid-November 2022. It follows our release preview program with an initial Release Preview Drop 1 and subsequently in December a second drop with a more stable release.
- Technical guide provides all the details you need, as a developer, to plan and refactor your code before our GA date.
- Testing your refactored code will be available in the release preview's initial Drop.1
What will happen during the upgrade?
- The Sugar upgrader will install all newly redesigned components in their proper places avoiding any conflicts that could potentially prevent upgrades.
- Metadata menus and links are upgraded and will be displayed in the new UX accordingly.
- Customization in base files will not be upgraded automatically however they can be reengineered to work with the new components by following this guide.
- Important to note you will not be able to simply override the new component with your current (prior to 12.3) code as the components have been redesigned and have different behavior.
- Notifications and Profile Dropdown were not affected by this change, however, it is important to review them accordingly
What action do I need to take?
- At the very least, you should plan to test your customizations on the new UI that exist in your Sugar instance to ensure it still works as expected after upgrade.
- Change management is an important
- This affects your end-users, so plan knowledge transfer sessions to adapt to this new experience.
- If you've built an app or integration for Sugar that uses a Module Loadable Package (MLP) that includes custom Header, Footer, Quicksearch, Quick Create and Logo
- You will need to refactor your customization manually to use the new components accordingly.
- You will also need to update your module manifest to indicate compatibility with Sugar 12.2 and greater.
Is there a workaround, if so, what are the steps?
- There’s no workaround planed for customizations, addons or MLPs at this point other than following the steps in this guide to refactor your code.
- if your customizations and/or partners could not refactor their code in time or if your company is not ready to empower/train your users in time of GA.
- As an admin, you can request to postpone the upgrade on your instance
- Open a support ticket requesting it.
- We do, however, encourage you to upgrade your sandboxes and work on technical details as required.