Over the past week, you may have noticed the site receiving some design updates. The most significant of these is the new top navigation bar, where we've made many usability improvements.

The New Navigation Bar

Firstly, we wanted to keep the colors the same. We consider the red-to-blue gradient part of our brand, and so while we did experiment with some monochromatic navigational bars with blurred transparency, we decided to stick with the strong colors we've always had. Of course, it still supports both our light and dark site themes.

Secondly, we needed to declutter the navigation bar which meant moving some of the lesser accessed links to dropdowns. We didn't want to just have basic list dropdowns though so we created cards with miniature screenshots of the pages with matching header colors and descriptions. We still kept the most important links always accessible though including the Dashboard which is accessed most frequently by customers.

Thirdly, improving the mobile experience. The "hamburger" menu as it's commonly referred to was difficult to use on mobile devices due to how we had implemented it. With this total rewrite of the navigation bar, we were able to significantly improve the menus reliability on mobile and make it look much nicer too. We also had enough room to keep a dedicated Dashboard button present while on mobile.

Fourth, legibility. The previous navigation bar used thin text that was difficult to read against our bright background gradient. We have now switched to a more bolder font style and we've introduced our staggered dropshadow present on other page elements to the text of the navigation bar aswell. This makes it much easier to read and we've also done away with reducing the size of the font if your display size is smaller than average, we instead reduce the whitespace between menubar items before finally stepping down to the mobile interface. This keeps the navigation bar text legible on all screen sizes at all times.

Fifth and finally, site-wide address lookups. This has been something we've wanted to add to the navigation bar for a while, the ability to lookup an address from any page on the site. We've renamed our threat pages to lookup pages as this much better represents what these pages are for.

Design is an iterative process and we will likely perform a few more tweaks to the navigation bar over the coming months.

Status Page Updates

Over the past several weeks we have been dealing with network issues with servers in our Asian service region and due to that, we had to take the entire region offline and forward traffic to our European servers. This resulted in our customers based in Asia facing higher than acceptable latency and although our status page indicated our Asian servers were offline for maintenance there wasn't any reason provided for why that was the case.

To remedy that we updated our status page with a new incident messaging feature that lists current incidents at the very top of the page and past incidents at the very bottom providing both current and historical information. We spent some time on the presentation, colors and iconography of this feature to make it as accessible and understandable as possible. Our key goal was to provide you with the exact information you need in as concise a way as possible.

So those are the updates for today we're constantly re-evaluating the service and that includes design, making sure we're staying current with modern expectations and maintaining a high level of usability and efficiency in our designs, we think we've struck the right balance with these updates and hope you think so too.

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful week!