GCP – Introducing a new homepage for Google Cloud

For over a decade, the cloud has presented developers, data scientists, and engineers an incredible opportunity to deploy and run applications faster, while maintaining developer-centric tooling, higher-level abstractions, and click-to-deploy solutions. At Google Cloud, we’ve continued to design, refine, and iterate our experience so that our customers can be as productive as the world demands. That has meant designing a user experience rich with cloud tooling, a great CLI experience, and simple workflows. Often that means balancing reducing the steps needed to get to your destination without sacrificing the information needed to make informed decisions. 

We’ve heard from you all that the Google Cloud dashboard could use some improvements. Our existing dashboard presents graphs, links to documentation, and news. Though the information is helpful, we know we could do better. We’ve heard the homepage needs to be fast, simple and helpful for getting back to recently used products. As they say, sometimes “less is more.”

We’re thrilled to introduce a new homepage on Google Cloud. We have redesigned the page for simplicity, performance, and navigation. The new page gives you a clean and streamlined experience that helps you navigate to your most relevant destinations. The streamlined UI also helps you stay organized and is designed to help you complete your task. You can find this page by heading straight to console.cloud.google.com and signing in.

The new homepage includes:

A clean header that clearly displays the project you’re working in, with the ability to copy the project number and ID, with a click of a button.

Actionable recommendations to better secure your environment or help reduce spending.

Key actions to quickly create a Compute Engine VM, GKE cluster, or Storage bucket, or, run a query in BigQuery.

Quick access to head straight to your most used product pages. This is based on featured products or content you recently viewed across all your projects, enabled by Google Cloud ML-powered Active Assist.

A link to the All products page that showcases all of the Google Cloud products and key partner products in one, easy-to-navigate place. 

Links to the original dashboard page.

Get clear, actionable information

Our goal is to give you clear, actionable information and reduce the time it takes to get to your most relevant destinations. With the new page layout, you’ll know exactly which organization and project you are working in, which is useful for those of you operating under multiple organizations/projects or in larger resource hierarchies. 

With the key action buttons at the top, you no longer need to go to the product page first to do common tasks like spinning up a VM or GKE cluster.

Save time to get back to your tasks

The new homepage is faster in multiple ways, saving you time. The new homepage loads approximately 40% faster than the dashboard. The homepage also reduces the time for you to navigate. We are seeing people navigate up to 43% faster. This means from the time you head to the homepage, you’re able to head to your destination/task faster than with the project dashboard.

To give you a customized experience1, we’re surfacing your most relevant product pages based on what you’ve recently viewed via quick access powered by Active Assist. Quick access gets you back to your previous task or to a portion of the console you visit frequently. You can quickly head straight to those pages without scrolling through the side menu. Quick access is a cross project view to help you switch back to a page you were in possibly in another project. This is one of our first cross project views so let us know how you like it! 

When you want to explore more products not listed in quick access cards, you still have access to the side menu or All products page and can pin products to the top of your side menu. 

Google Cloud Platform is now called Google Cloud

To further simplify your experience and ensure consistency across our products, Google Cloud Platform is now called Google Cloud. In addition, the mobile app name (previously called Cloud Console app) is renamed to Google Cloud app, and you’ll see this update reflected across most of our website and documentation. 

We hope you find the new homepage a simplified, smooth, and improved experience. 

If you have any feedback or suggestions, reach out to me at @stephr_wong. And join us on a Twitter Space @googlecloudtech on June 23, 202 to learn more about this new page from our product team. 

Interested in developer news and tools? Check out our Developer Center and join Google Cloud Innovators. 

Footnote:

1: Quick access is only personalization for those with personalization toggled on. For quick access to be personalized to you, both your Google Cloud personalization and Web & App Activity controls need to be toggled on.