Pergamon Version 2.0

The Pergamon CMS is reaching a significant developmental milestone this week. Pergamon is evolving out of the version 1.x era and venturing into version 2.0, a versioning milestone that signifies transformative evolution and a pathway to incremental product maturity. 

After intensive and exhaustive behind-the-scenes cross-functional collaboration among Pergamon’s Software Engineering, UX Design, and Product teams, we are humbled to roll out a major design overhaul as the main highlight of version 2.0. 

Why was this exercise undertaken?

At Pergamon, we believe in the ethos of continuous improvement - relentlessly identifying product areas that can be improved and aligned with positive user experiences. Upon identifying some “usability cracks” in the existing designs and based on user feedback, it becomes evident that a design overhaul exercise was needed to reduce the users' cognitive load while interacting with the system. 

How did we go about it?

The Product Design Team at Pergamon Labs took an aggressive “identify and iterate” approach. The team first initiated a thorough sweep of the existing user journeys (workflows) in Pergamon and identified UX anti-patterns, usability hiccups, and misleading designs. We scoped it, planned it, and got onto it! 

The result

We implemented new designs across the system focussing on usability, discoverability, and user-centricity at the core. By keeping in mind modern UI/UX design best practices, the Pergamon Design team has made the following changes by applying the Material Design 3 framework.

Design Updates

Clean and Crisp Home Page

The Home page gets a clean and crisp look with adequate contrast adhering to the WCAG guidelines. Both the Light Mode and the Dark Mode are readable and easy on the naked eye. The Dark Mode is specially optimized for users preferring it over the Light Mode.

Dark Mode

Light Mode

Improved Left Sidebar Navigation

We updated the left navigation sidebar by adding clear categorization of the sidebar menu items. For example, Documents and Publications are now nested under the parent menu item - Projects.

Improved Access to Notifications, Support, and Logout
We relocated the notification, Support, and the log out options from the left sidebar to the top right corner of Pergamon for easy accessibility. 

Progressive disclosure via Ellipsis Menu

In the previous 1.x versions of Pergamon, most action buttons were exposed and displayed explicitly adding to visual clutter. With version 2.0, we have introduced the vertical Ellipsis menu to “house” the action buttons inside it. When a user needs to perform actions like deleting a Document, the user can simply click on the Ellipsis and choose the Delete action.

The Ellipsis component is a standard component in UI design that enables the UI design concept of “progressive disclosure” and is well recognized by web users, thus keeping interfaces clean by revealing options only when needed.

Adherence to W3C Consortium

In the previous 1.x versions of Pergamon, we made use of country flags to denote or indicate the language. However, we realized that country flags are not accurate representations of language. This was validated through W3C guidelines and recommendations. 

Before

After

Updated Icons for Clarity and Discoverability

In the previous 1.x versions of Pergamon, some of the icons in the systems were ambiguous and misleading. With version 2.0, we have minimized the ambiguity in icons by introducing new standards icons that are easily recognizable. 

Updated Terminology and Labels

Along with redesigning the user interface, we also made some changes to the UI text and terminology for better clarity, adhering to UX Writing best practices. 

We have made the following terminology changes to some of Pergamon’s workflows:

From Questionnaire -> Assembly 

In the previous 1.x versions of Pergamon and in our internal product language, we referred to the content retrieval process as “questionnaires”. While “Questionnaire” was easy to understand, it didn’t accurately reflect the actual workflow. In the content retrieval process, a user provides inputs to questions related to product characteristics and the system “assembles” the content into a fully constructed user manual. It mimics the process of “assembling” something step by step. Therefore, we have renamed the entire content retrieval process to Automate Content Assembly that consists of:

• Automated Document Assembly
• Automated Topic Assembly

So we have updated the terms from:

• IA Questionnaire -> Document Assembly
• Topic Questionnaire -> Topic Assembly
• Select Questionnaire -> Select Assembly Framework

In the whole process, the term “assembly” is the keyword. For more on the terms and key concepts, see

You will find more updated terms in the UI as you navigate through Pergamon.

Make no mistake, this is not the end! 

Make no mistake, this is just the beginning. Pergamon is evolving, and there is much more to come.

The Pergamon Team.