alt Hacker Newssorry to hear that's been your experience. i actually joined through an acquisition about a year ago and one of the main things we've been focused on is the dashboard and overall dx.
sadly "hostile ux" is a phrase i've heard more than once and we're working hard to improve. if you're open to it, would love to hear more about the issues you've be running into
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You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become Akamai.
The reason everyone came running when Cloudflare first started was obviously the "burn VC money to gain marketshare" but it was also the sheer simplicity. They had one product and a handful of features.
Until someone on the business side takes a step back and says "when I mouse over 'Products' on the homepage, why the fuck is there a 'See All Products' link" it will be impossible to have a usable customer experience. Start killing things and making them features.
Thank you for saying this and being willing to listen.
The worst one I saw is the load balancer config UX/DX. I use CF's load balancer product for clients and so have to do a lot of setup and teardown back-and-forth. Everything related to setting up load balancers is split across multiple screens and/or "wizards" that are extremely confusing.
A lot of the error messages you get are generic at best and so you waste a ton of time clicking between pages and tabs just to set up some pools and attach them to a load balancer.
There's also some inconsistency between how things are labeled, so one thing can have two names and you have to hold that in your head while you move around the UI.
Email in profile if you'd like to chat further.
The one I saw most recently was working with an SRE coworker. Data in what looks like a table, in this case a subdomain/IP address, that overflows the cell gets cut off with no ability to actually view it. I almost had him just edit the CSS in Chrome, but he figured out a different workaround.
Never, ever put a form into a popup. Ever.
I don't even know where to start. I want to host a static site and it's a closed beta so password protection would be nice.
Let's see, first menu item Compute. Hrm, HTML isn't compute, oh it's there ok. Add Application, HTML isn't an application but ok. 95% of the page and on top are fields for adding a worker. The static page option is a little link at the bottom. Linked it to my repo. Oops wrong repo can I change it, oh, no. Ok delete and set it up all over again. Zero trust. Asked for some field, couldn't determine if it was a root domain, subdomain, URL. Ask the built in AI. It says hrm it's not in the docs, idk. Figure out how to add Cloudflare as an auth provider, link it to the static page. Team member says they can't login even though they're a Super Admin. Ah, I have to add their email manually or say all users of the account, otherwise by default Super Admins are locked out of authenticating via Zero Trust CF.
At one point I asked the AI for a copy of my email related DNS records it froze for 15 min while it output in a single textarea line char by char an extremely long key. Maybe that one's on me, but since the AI was frozen and couldn't be interrupted maybe not.
These are just the parts I remember off the top of my head. Most of us work in this field and should be sympathetic to the fact that designing a dashboard for this much data density isn't trivial. But that's tempered by CF deciding it's the gatekeeper for a web that’s supposed to be decentralized and spending a zillion dollars on engineering.
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The dashboard UX has improved a lot lately but one thing that drives me absolutely nuts is that I get rate limited all the time using it.
For example, I had to recently change an env var we had on a handful of apps and opened them all into new tabs and made the changes and about half way through I started getting rate limited. This has happened to me many times and I've reported it to support and in Discord but it still happens.
One other big complaint is support is non-existent. We sent many support emails (on business plans) and I'm pretty sure we've never gotten a reply. Same for posting in Discord. It's pretty disheartening to build your business on Cloudflare and have no confidence support will help you when you need it.