What do you think of Contemporary Mode?
Unibusch
Newbie
What do you think of Contemporary Mode? Do you ignore it and proceed directly to Classic Mode?
On the Mysonicwall website, Contemporary Mode is the default display but I am finding it to be too unfriendly. I must wait 5 minutes for the Resources and Support - Download Center screen to be usable. Watching a spinner for that long is a waste of my time. In Classic Mode, I can click on Downloads link and the page is displayed immediately. From there, I can access the firmware, apps, etc.
Partial workaround- To see what firmware is available for my TZ600 in Contemporary Mode, I know I can go to the Product Management list and pick one of the Serial Numbers to get it but a more responsive Download Center is preferred. This will allow me to see the firmware but not applications like the GVPN Client.
I am not too fond of the Contemporary Mode displays for the MySonicWall website and while navigating the TZxxx's internal screens, but if Contemporary Mode is the company's direction, I will use it more but the user experience must be improved.
Answers
Contemporary mode is the evolution of the SonicOS 6.5 interface. Once 6.5 came out I decided to just stick with it and have grown accustomed. I am doing the same with contemporary mode. Like most things, evolve or get left behind.
Also IMO, Sonicwall is playing catch-up with its competitors since the Dell acquisition screwed them.
I have seen where the Downloads page takes some time to load initially, but recently it seems snappier. Maybe they were hitting the limit of their resources and increased accordingly. Things will improve over the next few months. That's (fr)agile development.
Me too, I always go to the Classic as everything is easier to find and generally works and like you say it is much easier to navigate the downloads section,
the only things that I find work better in contemporary mode are the device registration as you can enter the Auth code as is rather that having to copy and paste the seperate sections, and the Support portal only seems to work in Contemporary mode,
like with most of the new GUI's they look like they were designed for Fruit machine addicts or children not for actual useability, I personally prefer just a normal gui without all the pretty gimics, I just want to configure them, make changes and troubleshoot any issues our customers have.
Yes the older GUI's are much cleaner, faster and easier in almost every way. The new ones don't even fit well to a smaller screen. I guess you get used to everything in the end when the old GUI's are gone, but that doesn't make them better than the old ones.
Change for the sake of change seems to be the motto these days, and stylized visuals are more important than actual usability. And that's coming from someone who has used Apple systems for 30 years. Design used to serve a function of usability but now it's just eye candy without any thought to if it hinders speed and ease of use.
Hi @UNIBUSCH,
Thanks for sharing your opinion on the MSW Contemporary Mode UI. We are definitely working on the Contemporary mode UI interface to serve it better User-Friendly. We are eventually going to end-up, removing the Classic mode UI interface and a full-fledged Contemporary mode in place for all users. Feedbacks from users, consumers, customers, partners, etc,., would definitely help us grooming the interface in a better way.
Please share your feedback for this from the MSW account. Screenshots for your reference.
Hope this helps.
Regards
Saravanan V
Technical Support Advisor - Premier Services
Professional Services
@Unibusch @TKWITS @preston @SonicAdmin80 - thank you very much for your feedback. We absolutely understand the pain you are seeing with Support & Downloads and work is underway to improve the experiences there too. We are reviewing how its done in Classic mode as well as how other applications do it to bring the best experience to you. Rest assured - we will get it done. Like with any other UX change, there is an adjustment period and we appreciate you trying to adjust to it
We would love to hear more feedback on the more recent changes. Thanks to @preston for his feedback on Device registration. But what do you think of the Dashboard, User Groups and the Tenant Products tables? Please do share the feedback here.
Also, apart from @Saravanan 's suggestion for feedback in MSW, please do "Rate your Experience" using the link at the every top. That will also allow you to share both positive and negative feedback. We're using that to identify which screens to prioritise for UX changes.
Any others want to chime in on this thread or via the "Rate your Experience" please keep the feedback coming in. Often we see blank ratings and while that gives us a sense, it would be more helpful if you also told us why you rated it a certain way. And thats how we can continue to make it better for you.
@SuroopMC
Thanks for taking the time, to reply, personally I don't use the User Groups, Tenants etc.. I only mainly use it to register products, download firmware, we don't genally run it as an MSP portal, all our customers have their own Mysonicwall accounts,
one thing which is annoying which I keep getting fobed of with support, is for SonicWall to add an update GUID option for virtual machines on MysonicWall, as I run them all the time, it is a nuisance every time I have to rebuild a VM which I'm licensed for I have to ring support to break the trust so I can then re-register the appliance,
it would be more efficient if the option, which is available in the Classic mode only, when you first register a VM when you select add licenses manually it asks you to update the GUID code.
So the function is in there but it disappears after you have first updated it, so the next time you select the option to add licenses manually and select, it just gives you the License keyset file which is expected,
but what I'm asking for and I'm sure it will help all other users of the Virtual machines is to also leave the option to update the GUID after the first time, so if you have to rebuild the VM for any reason, you don't have to bother support and you can just put the new GUID in.
it is not an issue where a user can abuse it, as you can only assign one GUID to one serial number, but obviously this fuction would need adding in also in to the contemporary mode.
I use the classic interface. I've had problems with the interface in the past as all processing goes through core 0.
@SuroopMC - just a small bit of feedback (because you asked) and it is keeping with the thread topic of "downloads."
If I go to the Downloads page in the Contemporary Workspace, the list provided appears to be for the last product I registered. I don't know why that is, nor how to change it - no matter what I select and then download, this last product reappears at my next login. This is especially disconcerting after I have specifically selected a Tenant prior to visiting this option.
What I would expect to see would be the downloads associated with the selected Tenant's appliances. That would make it significantly easier to work with.
Appreciate that you are willing to consider this.
Doing away with Classic mode is disappointing. I would prefer a somewhat hidden button on the screen that will toggle the view. I can live with that.
It would be nice if all the relevant doc was kept together with the appropriate product releases.
It would also be nice if Support cases had a button to collect whatever support items (TSR's etc) are required from the SonicWALL product and auto populate rather than wasting the support technicians and the customers time. The TIME SAVINGS would be MASSIVE. The customer experience would be ENHANCED. This can already be done so ...?
tsr, config, log, in diag.html the three traces and that's it. when it is serious even from console i diag show ...
I don't see this as a problem
Hi @Alberto ,
Well I'm not saying it doesn't work I just saying its a waste of a lot of peoples time when its probably so easy to automate.
You say you open dozens of tickets. Lets say you open 40 tickets a year * 15 Mins to collect the logs, TSR's, and so forth.
Now multiply that our for every SonicWALL user.
Now include the SW tech time for each request.
S.
Why on earth would you do away with the classic mode - when I call for assistance your own technicians switch it to classic mode to save time? I consider classic mode the Windows 8 start menu - immediately put the classic shell menu on as it is much more efficient. I like the screen that shows a gui representation of the firewall. I don't recall seeing any other good things in the contemporary menu - maybe because 99% of the time I switch it to classic.