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Ask Slashdot: Best Management Interface On an IT Appliance?

Posted by timothy on from the one-you-never-need dept.

tippen writes "The management user interface on most networking and storage appliances are, shall we say, not up to the snuff compared to modern websites or consumer products. What are the best examples of good UX design on an IT appliance that you've managed? What was it that made you love it? What should companies (or designers) developing new products look to as best-in-class that they should be striving for?"

9 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Not enough Flash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Not enough Javascript. Not enough external dependencies. Yeah, this totally needs to be more like modern websites.

    1. Re:Not enough Flash by Chris+Newton · · Score: 3, Insightful

      For example, take a classic list ordering GUI with up/down buttons. Works fine without javascript. Add javascript to make it also do drag&drop. It works better with javascript, but still works just fine without.

      Web interfaces can gracefully degrade down to a very low level.

      Yes they can, but not for free.

      This sort of idea makes us geeks feel warm and fuzzy inside, but the reality is that you're talking about implementing two completely different versions of that UI feature. Doing so takes time and money, and you’d be spending that time and money purely to support a use case that probably represents a negligible number of users (people who want to run these UIs but have JS disabled).

      Of course portability and compatibility are important for user interfaces, but this is a cost/benefit question. There is a line beyond which the results do not justify the effort, and any resources you’re spending past that line aren’t being spent on implementing other features or improving the usability elsewhere in your UI.

  2. Focus upon usability, not looks ... by MacTO · · Score: 3, Insightful

    For usability, you need to look at your target market. This means that you should be asking the people who will buy your product, rather than the people on Slashdot. (If we are your target market, at least let us know what you are developing so that we can provide meaningful input.)

  3. Re:And the answer is... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I would agree. The best appliances have good CLIs and REST interfaces. Otherwise they are just a mess of crap. Have you ever seen a SAN interface? Or Vmware? Or Microsoft System Center? (if anyone can figure out what the hell is going on in that interface I would love to know.)

    The best of the crappy interfaces is probably something like Qnap, they have great IOS interfaces, and the regular web interface is decent.

  4. General goodness by bertok · · Score: 5, Informative

    Specific examples are hard to come by, but I've noticed the general trend that differentiates the "good" from the "barely usable"..

    * Scalability. For example, a good interface will pop up a "search" box for finding a security group in Active Directory. A bad one will let me chose security groups from a list or a drop-down. Both look equally good when the developer is working in a test environment. The latter will crash when used in a million-object directory. Similarly, check out the DNS management dialog box in Windows, or some Oracle tools. Both will show you "all" objects up to some limit (e.g.: 5000), but then provide a filter option to allow you to narrow down the "search" to prevent the GUI from melting if you look at a database with 500K tables. Yes. It happens. A lot. More than you think. Really.
    * Annotations. It's 2014 for Christ's sake! There is absolutely no reason not to include a general "note" or at least a "description" field with every. Single. Thing. Seriously. All of them. I'm not kidding. Look at VMware's vSphere interface as an example of this done reasonably well but not perfectly. They at least allow custom columns so you can tag things systematically. Better yet, newer versions of Microsoft's Group Policy allow annotations on every single setting.
    * Versioning. For example, Citrix NetScaler keeps the last 'n' versions of its configuration automatically (5 by default I think). Why the fuck Cisco can't do the same with their 1KB but omfg-they're-ultra-critical-to-the-whole-goddamned-enterprise config files I just don't understand. Maybe they're trying to save precious bytes...
    * Policy. Good examples are Cisco UCS Blades and, of course, Active Directory Group Policy. Settings should trickle down through hierarchies. I should never have to set the exact same setting five hundred times. Settings should set-and-unset themselves automatically based on the scenario, e.g.: replacing a blade should not involve having to reconfigure its BIOS settings by hand. A typical bad example is 99% of Linux, where every setting has to be either manually set or set via a script. A script is still manual, just faster. No! Smack yourself in the face! A script is NOT a replacement for a policy engine. Don't breathe in, ready to go on a rant about how great Linux is, and how easy it is to manage, because it's really not. Scripts are a "write only" management tool that result in impossible-to-reverse-engineer solutions that can only be replaced wholesale years down the track.
    * Help. I'm not really a storage engineer, I just... dabble. However, I've set up labs with IBM and EMC kit, no problem. The one time I got asked to create a simple logical volume on a Hitachi array, I walked away backwards and refused to touch the stupid thing. It seriously had 10 pages of settings along the lines of "L3 Mode: 5/7?" I mean... wat? So sure, I press F1 for help like a naive fool. It helpfully informed me that the setting configures L3 Mode to either mode 5 or mode 7. I can press "OK" to accept the mode setting, or "Cancel" otherwise. I was enlightened. Meanwhile, the same dialog box on the EMC array basically asks for where, what size, and what RAID level.
    * Behind the Scenes. Some GUIs have 1:1 mappings with some sort of underlying command-line or protocol. Consoles based on PowerShell such as most Microsoft and Citrix products come to mind, most Linux/Unix GUIs, and Database admin tools. The better ones will have a "tab" or a pop-up somewhere which shows the "script equivalent" of whatever you're doing in the GUI. This is very useful, particularly for beginners, and we're all beginners with every product at least once.

    Really, GUI design is -- or should be -- a science, and not a trivial one! It integrates serious engineering constraints, business restrictions, project management priorities along with the fuzzy complexities of both individual psychology and the complex dynamics of interacting groups of people. It's done woefully wrong even by the largest c

    1. Re:General goodness by bertok · · Score: 4, Informative

      I love hearing from the front-line what the users actually want, what they like and what they would like to see improved.

      This.

      It's surprising how little feedback there is in the real world.

      One of the best experiences of my career (when I had a developer hat on), was sitting in the room where Level 1 and 2 support staff were on the phone, supporting a system that I had built and was doing Level 3 support on. Until then, it would not have occurred to me that a good 20% of their time was wasted on looking up contact details. No problem, I integrated a one-click contact-lookup function into the dashboard system. They loved it. I never would have thought that "fast search" (think milliseconds) was a "feature" until I saw how important it was for a helpdesk person to not have to wait for anything while talking to someone interactively.

      Things of that nature resulted in a UI that -- while a bit quirky from a developer's perspective -- allowed them to get their jobs done efficiently! It was all really simple stuff to implement, but I wouldn't have ever gone down that path if I didn't have that direct feedback and on-site observation of user behavior.

  5. Re:And the answer is... by mysidia · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I would agree. The best appliances have good CLIs and REST interfaces. Otherwise they are just a mess of crap. Have you ever seen a SAN interface? Or Vmware?

    Yes.... NetApp DataOnTap's SSH shell + OnCommand and VMware ESXi SSH console and .NET vCenter client are some examples of Companies designing management interfaces properly.

    If you think THOSE or bad............. then I got a ton of devices with crappy CLIs and GUIs to show you.

    *Now VMware is moving in the crappiness direction with their whole deprecation of the .Net client, and shiny new crappy Web1.5 Flash-enabled webUI developed using Adobe flex, but newer vSphere not in production, so don't count the horrible unusable web "UI" against them just yet.

  6. Re:None by msauve · · Score: 4, Interesting

    s/telnet/ssh/

    I prefer my critical infrastructure management to be somewhat secure.

    --
    "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
  7. Re:Take a look at Synology's DSM by PsyMan · · Score: 3, Informative

    I would have to agree with you, Synology for their NAS range is very intuitive for non techy people, shame the hardware underneath is a bit underpowered for what it could be. For SOHO though you could pretty much run one as the main server. Great GUI for a linux backend. XPEnology is pretty good too though, best of both worlds when installed on to a mid end PC (thinking i5 / low end Xeon ?) not entirely legal though I suspect. I guess the usibility is why their NAS's hold their price second hand as it can't be the power of the hardware or reletively slow network transfer rates that keep them popular. Hmm, where have we seen that before ? Apple ?