Director of UX here. We're trying to focus on improving existing workflows and less on visual design changes. That being said, form styles will be overhauled soon.

As a general principle, my plea is PLEASE keep a check on the number of clicks to do something.

The range picker used to be great where you had a text field allowing you to quickly type a time range in a single field; now it's:

- 1 click on the time range;

- 1 click on Custom Time Range;

- tab or click on the From Field;

- tab or click on the To Field.

It often seems like UX teams can’t help themselves and that the urge to destroy useful in favor of some idealized UI that doesn’t solve the task at hand comes with them. The UX industry is terrified of expert users or having to understand the product.

I hope this doesn’t happen to grafana.

It’s literally my job to keep Grafana real. Our budding UX team is getting a lot of training on SRE as a discipline and we run weekly internal UX feedback sessions where all of engineering can join and course-correct. Same with weekly feedback sessions with our existing user base. Get in touch with david at grafana if you’d like to participate.

As a Grafana user in an extremely large organization, I think the current UX leaves little to be desired. Definitely keep the simplicity of it up.

mail sent, thanks

It's a somewhat insulting stereotype to think of designers as merely being interested in "sexy color schemes".

There are many people in the design/UI/UX space specialising on (often numeric) information design. They tend to be as fluent as any programmer in statistics, if not more.

To this day, programmers tend to conspiratorially suggest to designers to read Edward Tufte, even though his are the first books they make you read in any information design class, and have been since the early 80s.

GP didn't use 'sexy color schemes' to denigrate the hypothetical work that might be done, it was a description of what they like today.