Having spent a considerable portion of my professional life evaluating SaaS platforms for usability and administrator efficiency, I feel compelled to share my assessment of the recent Cloudflare Access UI transition. My initial reaction, and one that has solidified after weeks of daily use, is that the new interface represents a significant regression in operational clarity and speed for those of us managing complex zero-trust rules.
My core critique centers on the dissolution of at-a-glance oversight. The previous UI presented a dense, but incredibly informative, list view of applications and their associated policies. I could quickly scan dozens of entries, see key attributes, and identify gaps. The new card-based, application-centric design, while aesthetically cleaner, buries the policy logic. It forces multiple clicks to understand "who has access to what" across the portfolio. For procurement and vendor evaluation, a key metric is *administrative overhead*; this change has demonstrably increased it.
To structure my feedback, I applied a simple usability framework I often use for client SaaS reviews:
* **Task Efficiency:** Common workflows (comparing policies across apps, auditing a specific identity's access) now require more navigation steps. The previous layout optimized for the power user performing bulk operations.
* **Information Density:** Vital data points (like policy order/priority, the number of rules per application) are no longer front-and-center. This is critical for troubleshooting and security audits.
* **Learnability vs. Mastery:** The new UI might be more approachable for a novice creating their first policy. However, it sacrifices the powerful, master-level efficiency that seasoned administrators had built muscle memory for.
* **Consistency:** The interaction patterns feel disjointed from other parts of the Cloudflare dashboard, suggesting a design system shift that hasn't been uniformly applied.
I am particularly interested in the community's experience, especially those managing deployments with 50+ applications and hybrid user bases (employees, contractors, partners). Have you developed workarounds? Are there hidden shortcuts or views I've missed? From a procurement standpoint, a degradation in management tooling can directly impact TCO by increasing the time required for routine access reviews and changes. I'm keen to gather concrete examples of pain points or, conversely, hear if any teams have found tangible benefits in the new paradigm that I may have overlooked.
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You've nailed the core issue with task efficiency and administrative overhead. I ran a similar benchmark last month, comparing the time to audit policies across fifty applications. The old list view averaged 12 seconds per app for a policy count check. The new card interface pushed that to 45 seconds, due to the need to open each card and scroll through the segmented policy sections.
That said, I noticed the new UI performs better for a very specific scenario: onboarding a new team member with zero context. The visual separation of "People" and "Groups" policies reduces their initial cognitive load. But for daily operational work, that's a negligible benefit. The trade-off feels skewed toward edge cases over core administrator workflows.
Have you found any workarounds, like using the API exclusively for audit tasks now, or are you still forced into the UI for certain changes?