Hi 
When you go to a job canvas to interact with a block step, you must first zoom in to the block step (clicking “Follow” or typing “j” helps), then hover over the canvas element associated with the block step, and then click the button that appears on hover.
My team is using Buildkite to deploy one of our systems. The system is deployed in sequential stages of increasing importance, asking the user for input via block steps at each stage. So we are interacting with the block step on the canvas ui a lot. Overall we really like the canvas ui for this process a lot compared to the default view, but we have two frustrations.
The first and biggest frustration is having to hover over the canvas element associated with the block step in order to reveal a button that opens the block dialog when clicked. It would be so much nicer to be able to open the dialog with a single mouse click on the canvas element, perhaps in combination with a keyboard key to avoid breaking existing canvas logic associated with single mouse clicks.
The second and lesser frustration is having to zoom in, or click “Follow”, or type “j” to bring the canvas element associated with the block element into closer focus so we can hover over it. It would be much nicer if it were possible to open the canvas and have it automatically bring a specific step, or even just the active step, into focus. Perhaps by having something in the URL path/params, or a user profile setting?
Thanks for hearing me out!
Max
Hi @maxenglander,
Welcome to the Buildkite Support Community!
Thanks for the feedback on our Canvas UI. I will pass on your user experience to our design team.
Cheers!
Hi Max! I’m from the product team. Thanks for raising this, I know the canvas can be hard to navigate when you have a lot of steps and it gets small.
Something we’re working on at the moment is actually a revamp of our build page to make builds easy to use and also make the canvas easier to use. It’s great that you’re already getting value out of it. But why don’t you send me (or @lizette) a direct message with your email address, and we can turn on this new build page for you while it’s in private preview. It’s going into general accessibility in the next month or so.
One thing that helps in this situation, is that we’ve created a new step sidebar that acts as the new main navigational aid around a build. Which you can also filter. Clicking on a step there will focus it on the canvas.
Cheers,
Chris
1 Like
Oh I meant to say that making unblocking faster (less clicks) is on our improvement list! Which we’ll hopefully get to soon. I’d like that too!
Hey @chris_barrell, I couldn’t figure out how to send a DM on here, but my work email is max at planetscale dot com. Feel free to enable the revamp for me, I’d love to check it out!
Hello, @maxenglander! I have turned on the new build page view for the user account tied to the email address you provided. Let us know what you think!
Best,
Karen
Hi @karen.sawrey and @chris_barrell,
Thanks for putting me into the new view. I’ve run through our deploy process with it a couple of times and I have some (mostly positive!) feedback.
- Overall, I like it a lot. Having the list view in the left pane, canvas in the middle, and being able to toggle open job output without having to navigate away is super nice. Everything I want to see in one place.
- I really like that I can click block/input steps in the left pane, and it pops open the block dialog without me having to do the hover-and-click dance which is needed in the canvas drawer.
- The ability to “Group by State” is really nice. It makes it much much easier to bring waiting block/input steps into my focus. I really like that the UI remembers my last “Group by State” selection.
- The last two bullets together address one of the challenges I raised in my original message. Because the left pane gives me what I need in terms of being able to focus and click on waiting block elements, my perceived deficit of the UX for opening block dialogs within the actual canvas is somewhat moot.
Some constructive feedback:
- The “State” filter is nice. For my purposes I typically select “Failed” “Running” and “Waiting”. However I find it a little frustrating that it doesn’t remember my last selection, so after trying it once or twice, I stopped using it.
- I still wish that the UI would remember my last “Follow” selection
- I found that with “Follow” mode selected, the UI sometimes fails to properly center the next running step after the previous one completes (screenshot attached).
