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First impressions of Gen 7 interface

DarkAlmanDarkAlman Newbie ✭
in Mid Range Firewalls

Generally speaking it's pretty intuitive despite the changes. While the menus have changed the options and verbage have stayed the same for the most part which I appreciate so it didn't take long to get up to speed.

Excuse the old man griping (They went and changed things again!?) I intend this as constructive criticism.

I understand the need to drive towards an HTML 5 design to support the cloud management, but I wish it didn't have to happen at the cost of productivity. Changes that used to take seconds now take minutes, and while some of that is just me getting used to the new interface, a lot of it is due to inefficient menu design.


Interface takes a long ass time to load, which is really annoying when you have an emergency change to make and you have to stare at the loading screen. I found myself loading it and working on something else for a while only to click back on the browser tab and be timed-out because of the 5 min default time-out limit.


A lot of settings are now spread out between the different tabs Home, Monitor, Device, Network, Objects, Policy where as they all used to be easily accessible in a single menu on the side. Some of the settings it's obvious where they are and other seem non-nonsensical. I'm finding myself doing a lot of shifting between multiple tabs to perform basic tasks. Basically it's a whole bunch of unnecessary clicks and hunting and pecking when it should all be in one unified menu. Something are up top, some are on the side, when it should all be in the same place.

There's a lot of inconsistency between menus. The 'add' button for example is at the top for interfaces, and at the bottom for NAT rules and Firewall rules. Which for the later means it's gets cutoff and you can see it without scrolling on lower res screens.

Modifying an interface doesn't have an obvious button. It took me a while to realize you have to mouse over to get the Edit menu to pop up. Not intuitive.

Interface doesn't scale well on lower resolution screens. Dealing with lower res screen is a fact of life as an MSP administrator. Have to work out of RDP sessions + remote sessions a lot so resolution isn't always super high and can't be modified. 'Apply' button at the bottom of the window is frequently cutoff and there's no easy way to scroll down.

Editing a Firewall rule or NAT rule now has 3 separate tabs instead of being a single pane. Again a bunch of unnecessary clicking back and forth between tabs when making a simple change. I guess you were trying to copy Palo Alto's interface? Which is a shame yours was way more efficient to do things in.

Category: Mid Range Firewalls
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Answers

  • ThKThK Cybersecurity Overlord ✭✭✭

    @DarkAlman Welcome to the club.

    What hurts me, is that we have to migrate to the new version. And you're right, it seems we're all beta testers in life.

    I also started with these new devices. And not a few of us ran into prblems we not knew in 6.x

    We were promised a better experience, but you made a perfect conclusion.

    What I was really waiting for was a second window that could be opened on another screen to see what is going on during the changes i make, but I haven't seen it yet ...


    --Thomas

  • NatNat Newbie

    Take a look on PA UI. Most likely, SonicWALL is coping from them.

  • LarryLarry All-Knowing Sage ✭✭✭✭

    Modifying an interface doesn't have an obvious button. It took me a while to realize you have to mouse over to get the Edit menu to pop up. Not intuitive.

    If only that was the sole "not intuitive" instance, I would be happy. Instead, it is at the top of a long list of really awful decisions poorly implemented in an atrocious user interface.

    The more presentations I see that repeat how wonderful this is (or will be), the more I lose my faith that the people behind the scenes are doing the right thing for the SonicWall partner and customer communities.

    [[ pending moderator deletion ]]

  • SonicAdmin80SonicAdmin80 Cybersecurity Overlord ✭✭✭

    I bet the web developers don't actually use any of the products themselves and only design using large high resolution displays. And seems that management hasn't consulted any actual administrators either.

    What else could explain the poor usability with smaller screens and the general unintuitiveness.

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