Hi, I’m getting really confused by what your designers are trying to communicate with your pipeline icons for unblocking steps and showing which steps are currently blocked by controls.
Here is an example that makes sense to me, using your new UI, that uses the same visual language as your earlier UIs:
Thanks for the detailed write-up and screenshots — they make the issue really easy to see. Apologies for the confusion this has caused.
You’re right that the icons should be telling a consistent story across views, and from what you’ve shared it looks like they aren’t. We’re always iterating on the pipeline UI to make state easier to read at a glance, and clearly there’s a discrepancy here we need to dig into.
To help us narrow it down, could you confirm whether you see the same behaviour in the new Build UI as well, or only in the old one? That’ll help us work out whether this is a rendering issue specific to the new views or something deeper in how step state is being reported.
Additionally, when Deploy to QA and Tests - Smoke QA shows as a control icon, what did you see when you clicked on it?
I believe my images were from both the old and new UIs. The first 2 are from the old UI and the next 2 are from the new one, unless I’m misunderstanding your question?
As for what I see when I click on that button … those builds have moved on, but looking at one of the QA ones:
Thanks for the extra detail and the click experiment — that was really helpful. I was able to reproduce the same behaviour in a sandbox pipeline of my own and dig into what’s happening across the different views.
Here’s what I found:
Your mental model of the icons is correct, and matches where the product is heading:
|| (pause) → a step that requires your action, such as a block step waiting on input
(clock) → a step that’s waiting on an upstream dependency and will progress automatically once that dependency is satisfied
When I walked the same build across each view, the new UI’s Canvas and List views render this distinction correctly — QA deploy shows as || (it genuinely needs your input) and Deploy to QA / Tests - Smoke QA show as (they’re just waiting on the block step above them).
The older surfaces, however, haven’t been updated to use that same distinction yet. The classic UI’s build header strip and job detail page both show || for everything in that group, and within the new UI the Table view and the job detail panel that opens inside Canvas also still show ||. So you’re seeing the same step represented two different ways depending on which view you’re looking at — which is exactly the inconsistency you flagged.
The good news is that nothing about the underlying build behaviour is wrong: dependencies, gating, and click-through behaviour all work as expected (your click experiment confirmed this — clicking QA deploy opens the unblock prompt, while clicking Deploy to QA just opens its log/detail view because there’s nothing for you to action there). The inconsistency is purely in how the icon is rendered across views.
I’m going to share this thread and the reproduction internally with the team who own the pipeline UI so they’re aware that the icon language hasn’t fully propagated across all views yet. We can’t commit to a timeline on when those remaining views will catch up, but the direction the new UI is going in is the one you’d expect and we’re actively improving it.
Thanks again for the thorough write-up — this kind of detailed feedback is exactly what helps us close gaps like this.
I have to admit your last message filled me with great hope. Sadly, it looks like that was unwarranted. It looks like the confusion of what the “||” symbol means in BuildKite has actually gotten worse now.
Here’s a build from a couple of minutes ago. It seems that someone has now decided that everything gated by an unclicked input now gets its own “||”. Sigh.
Catching up in this conversation here. And thanks for the follow up and apologies if the UI does not seem as straightforward for you. Are you able to send us an email at support@buildkite.com to share the build url so we can provide it as an example to the existing feedback that was raised, and also for us to confirm that the icons || (pause) and (clock) icons are representing the states of the steps correctly.
In the meantime, we want to reassure you that even when the icons are wrong or has regressed, the actual behavior should still be consistent .
We hear the differences you are noticing. Based on your screenshots, it seems you’re using old UI, but we have made some improvements in the steps visibility as part of our new UI rollout. Going forward, we encourage customers to use the new UI, as it includes enhanced functionality and usability improvements. The classic UI will eventually be deprecated once the new experience is fully adopted.
If you refer to the different views on the new UI build page, as shown in my screenshots below, the differences are clearer.
Similarly, the Canvas view provides better visibility into each input/block step and its current status, making it easier to understand pipeline progress at a glance.
We discussed with the design team, and they agree on your findings that we shared. Team will look at adding right symbols to differentiate between waiting, paused or done. We will keep you posted once it is picked up and addressed, and will keep you posted once we have an update.
Our UI design team has added a fix for input steps that are waiting, which should now be shown with a clock symbol. This has been applied to both old and new UI.
(clock) → a step that’s waiting on an upstream dependency and will progress automatically once that dependency is satisfied
