Before

After

Look and feel – U With the new nav, we removed clutter, use flashes of color and clear iconography to accentuate the important bits. These new interactions are more considerate, straightforward, and guide you to the next step. We’ve got more to do on this front to make the entire Bitbucket experience more consistent and simpler, but we’re excited about this start!

Before

After

– This was unintuitive because icons were not easily understood. There were too many options and the mix of actions and navigation made it difficult to parse. As part of the UI cleanup, we wanted to remove as many of the hurdles between you and your work as possible. To simplify, we’ve grouped repo actions with other actions in the create (plus) menu and kept navigation simple.

Before

After

How did we test the new UI?

We’ve been testing our design direction from the beginning with actual users to validate and stay on track. .com was hugely helpful for early signal and getting quick qualitative feedback from real users. Building on those positive results, we shipped an initial implementation

Since then, we’ve expanded to hundreds of users, integration partners, and Atlassians and have received overwhelmingly positive feedback. Any UI change, especially one as large as adopting a new navigation paradigm, involves tough calls and tradeoffs. Based on our research and testing, we’re optimistic that people will intuitively understand the new layout and be even more productive with Bitbucket.

Most recent updates

Since we launched the new navigation experience back in April, we’ve been gathering a ton of feedback from our users?the good, the bad and ugly?and we’ve made some updates. So what did we change?

Blue color: the contrast of white text on the blue background of the global navigation was causing issues with readability so we altered the blue and lowered the contrast between the blue and white. You can compare below (old left, new right)

Keyboard shortcuts: in the first iteration of our new design, keyboard shortcuts were temporarily removed, but not for long. You can access the guide for all the shortcuts by hitting `shift + ?`

Badges for Pull Requests: We originally removed badges for pull requests from the new design because there was a performance hit every time the page loaded. We know this is an important count that many of you rely on, so we’ve placed it in the stats on the repository overview page as an interim step and are continuing to explore ways to surface that information.

Access to your teams: Teams are now accessible under your profile picture.

I have feedback on the new Bitbucket experience! How do I give it?

This initial roll out is just the beginning. We’ve started with navigation, updated bitbucket.org, and changes are now starting to flow in to product.

Now after all this testing, it is time to get feedback on a larger scale. We’re going to be continuing to improve the UI, the navigation, and all the things. While we do that, we’d love to continue getting feedback. To give us feedback, click on your profile picture and navigate to the “Give feedback” link to give us your thoughts. We’re listening! If you’re not already a Bitbucket user, sign up for Bitbucket to give it a try. Give us feedback and we hope you love the new UI as much as we do.

Get started, it’s free

Have more specific questions about this post? Reach out to us on Twitter to get the information you need.