Apex: The New Look and Feel for Apptio Products

As a company’s product line grows through acquisition and innovation, the user experience across products can sometimes become disjointed. Apptio Experience (Apex), Apptio’s new design system language, will be released on November 16. It brings together a common user experience and visual design across the entire product portfolio.

But change, even a good change, can be disrupting. That’s why we are giving you a chance to explore the new design at your own pace using a feature toggle in your user preferences menu found in the top right of every product page. This feature toggle can be used to explore Apex and then return to the current user interface (UI).

Beginning today, customers using Apptio IT Planning, Apptio Datalink, or Apptio Insights and Action Plans can already see changes to the header navigation and the UI. On Nov 16, these products will get the feature toggle at the same time as our other products and will be able to toggle the Apex New Navigation on and off.

On February 26, 2021, we will make Apex the default user experience for all customers. Our objective in 2021 is to complement our industry-leading suite of tools with a product experience that allows you to manage IT costs through a transparent, collaborative platform.

What to expect from the Apex experience

The Apex visual style is purposefully sparse, reflecting a clean, modern aesthetic that highlights customer data and moves the product chrome to the background. We’ve heightened the focus around primary actions using our Alpine color palette thereby reducing confusion over navigation paths through the products.

Apex grid

For instance, in products such as Self-Service Reporting & Analytics, Action Plans, and Agile Investment Management, the Apex design system allows you to focus on the data and management of your IT infrastructure because the interface elements fade into the background. We’ve worked to reduce extraneous page elements and provide an easy-to-learn, and easy-to-use, product user interface.

Apex User Interface for AIM

Apex is comprised of common interface patterns and an updated navigation paradigm displayed in a collapsible left panel navigation. An application switcher allows you to move quickly between products. And consistent utility navigation allows you to launch contextual product help or manage your preferences.

The left navigation panel can be summoned to navigate across products and dismissed to let you focus on the data presented on the page. We’ve thought deeply about our primary user interactions and have reduced the cognitive load of too many navigation choices, moving tertiary and supplemental controls to overflow menus.

What this means for you

With the release of Apex, we’ll reduce time to value and move our customers rapidly from exploration to insight. Apex is our first step in unifying the product user experience across our many offerings into a common platform. At the user interface layer, customers will benefit from familiar, learnable patterns that can be applied across all products.

This update is opt-in until February 26 at which time the new user experience will become the default setting. Until then, there will be no change to your product user experience unless you specifically toggle on Apex. You can test Apex and return to the current user experience as many times as you like until January 11.

Apex UI

It’s important to note that this change is an update to product navigation and information architecture and does not impact current product features.

After Nov 16, if you would like to explore the new user experience, navigate to the Apex toggle in your user preferences and choose Apex New Navigation. You can explore and then return back to the existing interface. Toggling to Apex will apply the setting across all products.

The future of Apex

We’re excited for the Apex release and will continue to make iterative improvements as we move into 2021. New products in the portfolio will be designed and built from the ground up using the Apex design system language. Product development using Apex will allow us to be faster to market, provide a compelling user experience, and deliver innovative products to our customers. We have much more in design for 2021 and we’re excited to continue innovating.

Register to attend TBMC20 to see more information about this and other Apptio and TBM innovations coming your way.

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