Today we're pleased to announce the public beta release of our updated user interface (UI) for Acquia Cloud.

Our goal is to create a UI that offers a level of automation that developers need to be efficient. We're doing this by reducing and eliminating the times you'll have to jump between pages, whether you're switching environments, moving between code, databases, and files, or monitoring your website's health. Now it's all on one page.

We want to reduce the complexity of the day-to-day activities for a developer. We believe that what developers really want is a fast and responsive UI.

To achieve this, to build a UI that developers want, our User Experience team spent countless hours interviewing Acquia Cloud users. The aim was to understand and define the features and functionalities needed today, as well as to conduct research to identify how technology changes will impact user needs in the future. With that in mind, Acquia's new UI has been built with user feedback and industry standards, such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, WCAG 2.0, in mind.

Releasing the new UI as a public beta also allows us to capture and continuously iterate on feedback from our users, to develop a UI that you want.

Significantly, this new UI will form the foundation to integrate UIs across our entire Acquia solution. We understand the need for consistency across all our products.

So how does Acquia Cloud's new UI simplify a developer's day-to-day activities?

The new UI:

• Provides a revamped information architecture and nomenclature, utilizing the most common tasks of our users. This will help minimize the number of clicks required to access frequently-performed tasks.
• Reduces the amount of page refreshes, by leveraging a single-page application that provides more real-time, asynchronous updating of data and action in the UI.
• Provides a consistent experience across all channels - desktop, tablet, and mobile.
• Utilizes a front-end framework of styles, components, and patterns that are consistent and strategically designed.
• Improves the onboarding experience such that developers can get both new and existing sites running quickly in dev and production on Acquia Cloud. We want to deliver a 'support-free' experience for you to onboard most of your sites and applications.
• Expands and completes our public APIs to enable use of the most common functionality that is possible through the UI, via the API.

We'd like to invite you to try our new UI and give us your feedback -- positive and negative. And we're not just saying that. In order to minimize the time required for you to provide feedback, we've built a feedback loop within the UI which can be accessed anytime you are using the UI.

Two other factors will improve the customer feedback cycle: 1. Our continuous deployment engineering process allows for more features to hit your screen faster, while still ensuring quality and security in every release; and 2. Feedback given through the UI will go directly to our Product team, allowing them to see issues as they are submitted, and quickly put a plan in place to resolve them.

So give it a try.

If you're an existing user, login at cloud.acquia.com. If you're not an existing user, create a free account with Acquia Cloud Free. You can also watch a demo of the new UI here.

We'll be listening.