At the moment the web interface of ASL uses approximately 20% of the screen height for the top logo (turtle) and the brown/grey bar. It has no useful information to the admin except the ASL version number. Even if branding is a very important part of the design, I suggest reducing it to 20-40 px in height, this would dramatically improve user experience. This would be very handy especially for small screens (netbooks, ultabooks with 11' or less). I bet most customers would agree.

My suggestion would be to remove the top bar (brown line with your logo) completely and to move all top navigation (support .... etc.) and ASL version to the bottom of the screen, below the "Vulnerability details" window. The logo (turtle) could easily go to the favicon and be removed from the top bar as well. This way most of the screen would be used and allocated for information currently displayed and will make the admin interface easier to use/user-friendly.

+1 from me for this. This is my only (albeit very slight) gripe with ASL at the moment

According to our stats about 60% of all the hits on the wiki & support portal come from the top breadcrumbs. I want to make the bar at the top smaller too, but the breadcrumbs appear to be right where they should be from our usage stats.

In that case to follow the logic, wiki/support links need to be the full height of the top bar to justify its height or keep it where it is and reduce the height or better still make it optionally resizable. Have attached a visual of how small it could go and not loose a single feature:


I understand you guys hot on security (not design) and not wanting to knock the truly great security product that is ASL, but the entire UI could be made a heck of a lot lighter: 39 Javascript files, 26 CSS files, 67 CSS images, 33 images. All the images can be reduce in size (some dramatically), plus sprites could be utilised. The CSS/JS could be minified and reduced into fewer files/http requests. Enable gzip/compression, extended caching/expiry dates etc in the http.conf. None of this would changed the UI one bit, but it would improve its performance.

Just a thought!

Hey thats a terrific look, you're more than welcome to send us patches & updates to ASL Web. Im sure you've noticed already, the system is not encoded either.

This is actually already in the pipe for the next iteration.

Some other performance related fun:
- almost all of the images are going away
- flash is going away
- ajax is going away
- the js and php are being re-written

Scott/jgodwin
Interested in contributing, would need to follow your instruction on how to proceed? Have 10 years experience developing website UI's, using/optimising HTML/CSS/JavaScript/PHP/MySQL & fluent in common graphics packages, sure I can be of some use, even if just reviewing in-development UI.
Over to you...

Input will certainly be welcome, but we're not quite to the point of revealing it yet.

Understood! Am prepared to sign NDA's etc if that makes it easier. Just want to see ASL become the best, kick-ass product it can be!

Kalimari: Just send me an email and I'll get you the forms: mike AT atomicorp DOT com.