Okta’s Redesigned End User Dashboard - Now 50% Faster!

Daniel Lu, April 21, 2021

You’ll often hear our CEO and co-founder, Todd McKinnon, talk about how our mission at Okta is to connect users to their technologies. An important part of how we do this is through the Okta End User Dashboard, a modern web portal that makes it simple and secure for end users to quickly get access to their applications.

With a single click, users can log into any of their enterprise or personal applications without the need to remember all of their different app URLs, usernames, or passwords. It can be accessed from any web browser, allowing the Dashboard to be device, location, and network agnostic. Millions of people authenticate against Okta every single day, and many go to the Okta End User Dashboard first. It’s a critical part of the end-user experience that we take great care in designing.

That’s why we’re very excited to announce our biggest redesign of the Okta End User Dashboard since 2014! It’s easier to navigate, more mobile friendly, and loads 50% faster than our previous Dashboard. Here’s what’s new:

New side navigation design

Our redesign starts with creating a new side-navigation panel, which sets the foundation for a more scalable and versatile design. Not only does it make getting around the Dashboard more intuitive, it also better aligns with other modern enterprise apps that you're probably already familiar with.

Updated app cards

Unofficially (and lovingly) referred to as “chiclets” by some of our long time customers, the app cards represent the various applications that a user has access to. We’ve enlarged the card and added more information within each card to make them more useful. Everything related to the application is contained within the card, so it’s easy to find and work with. Just like the old design, you can still drag and drop the cards to customise the look of your Dashboard.

Search is now fuzzy

With the average Okta user assigned over 80+ applications, it can be difficult to quickly get to the exact app you’re looking for - especially if you don’t remember the exact name of that app. Now, we’ve made the search algorithm more forgiving. We’ll find it, even if you don’t enter the exact app name.

Sections are the new tabs

We used to have a concept of “tabs”, which users created to organise and group their cards. We’ve reimagined it as “sections”, which better fits into the single-page Dashboard view. You can still create customised sections such as “Personal” or “Favourites” and move cards into those sections for easier navigation.

Don’t forget the browser plugin

We didn’t just update the End User Dashboard, we also updated the Okta Browser Plugin! Available on all common browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE, and Edge, the Okta Browser Plugin is a browser extension that syncs to your Dashboard and allows you to launch apps without going directly to it. I personally use it more often than my Dashboard because I don’t need to open up a new browser tab!

Available now in Early Access (EA)

Like what you see? Good news! As of February 2020, the redesigned Okta End User Dashboard and Browser Plugin are both available in Early Access, which means you can turn it on in your preview tenant to test it out today! When you’re ready to roll it out to all yours users, you can turn it on yourself in your production tenant as well. There is no need to reconfigure any settings or re-upload any images. We’ll port everything over to the new design, including existing tabs!

Need some help to prepare communications to your end users? Check out our End User Adoption Toolkit, which has templates that can help you roll out the new experience. We even have detailed project plan template to help you manage the rollout!

Give us feedback

We’d love to hear how you like the redesign. Please let us know what you think through this Feedback Survey! We’ll continue to incorporate feedback as we move into General Availability (GA) in the coming months. Stay tuned for more information!