ChangeWindows 6

[Studio384]

ChangeWindows 6 will be the first major revamp of ChangeWindows since early 2019.

Goals

• Provide a more visually pleasing design that distracts less from the content that is most important to the user.
• Provide "hubs" that summarize a single platform into a clear overview.
• Provide a more app-like design on smaller screens.
• Provide a search functionality.
• Provide better tools for potential contributors to the ChangeWindows codebase.

Targets

• Alpha 1: new management UI, Backstage search and permission system.
• Alpha 2: revamped front-end design and search.
• Alpha 3: improved management tools and editing UI.

Questions to explore

Are to many aspects color-coded?

Milestones, channels and platforms are all color-coded. This seems to much and makes things confusing. Platforms have their icon to identify themselves so they may be the most obvious choice to remove colors from, but colors do make it clearer what they are. Rings' color scheme are reasonably self-explanatory as red to blue indicates how stable the flight is and are in my opinion useful indicators. Milestones however isn't one I can find a good reason for to maintain colors; they are fun, but they don't provide any useful information on their own. Why is 1607 red? Why is 1703 green? This doesn't tell you anything and unless you go to the milestones page or hover over the colored circles, you don't know what milestone what belongs too. It might make the most sense to drop colors from milestones, at the very least as indicators.

Design

Features

Profile

The profile is being expanded with a number of new settings, including changing your email address and password, as well as adding an option to upload a profile picture. This is the only front-facing feature change that we will make in alpha 1.

Backstage

We're making a major revamp for the UI. The management UI will be split off from the front-end to allow for easier iteration for both. Most of the work on this should be finished when alpha 1 is released.

Permissions and roles

With version 6.0, we're introducing a major revamp to the permission system which will no longer be hardcoded into the codebase. Instead new roles can be created from within ChangeWindows and permissions that are assigned to features within the code can be toggled on or off for each role. Like the new management UI, this will be included in alpha 1.

Database structure

The goal for version 6 is for our database structure to remain backwards compatible with version 5. While ChangeWindows 6 can add new functionality or alter behavior compared to the current version, it can't do so in a way that requires both to have their own database set.