DataHub 1.0: A New UX Built for Scale, Clarity, and the Community
Written by Anna Everhart and Paulina Vargas from the Product Design Team at DataHub
Anna and Paulina take us behind the scenes of the exciting redesign of DataHub 1.0, showcasing how user feedback drove every change to create a more intuitive and powerful user experience.
Over the past year, we’ve been rethinking how design shows up within DataHub — not just how it looks but how it feels to use, how it scales, and how it reflects the community behind it.
At the heart of it, we wanted to build a product our users genuinely love.
We understand that the end user’s experience plays a big role in driving that desire to use the product, so our design had to be about more than just aesthetics. It had to deliver on usability, clarity, and trust.
That meant asking tough questions about what we value — and what kind of experience we want to create. A few core principles stood out and guided everything we did:
- Feedback fuels quality: We listen first. Every decision starts with what we’ve learned from the community.
- Simplicity above all: Clarity over complexity. The goal is to design with purpose, minimize friction, and make every interaction feel intuitive.
- Consistency is key: A strong design foundation. A cohesive experience will help users move faster and with confidence as the product evolves.
- Iterate and improve: Design is never done. Iterate based on feedback and real-world use, always aiming to make things better.
Now, after nearly a year of work, we’re proud to share DataHub 1.0. It marks a new level of clarity and intention. We’ve always believed that DataHub is built by the community, for the community — and with 1.0, that’s fully reflected in how we approach design.
In this blog post, we want to take you through what’s changed, why we made those changes, and how this sets us up for what’s next.
A Design System Built For Scale
Before 1.0, every part of the UI — colors, buttons, text styles, charts — had grown organically. Visuals varied across pages, and this inconsistency was beginning to make DataHub hard to navigate — and even harder to contribute to.
We’ve now built a shared design system using tokens defined in Figma and implemented in Storybook. These tokens govern color, spacing, font sizes, shadows, and more, allowing us to clean up visual clutter while making the system easier to extend.
This effort is also a push for consistency and quality that will ultimately help us design at scale.
This is a massive effort (big shoutout to our development team!), and we’re rolling it out incrementally. You’ll notice UI changes with every new release as we make progress.
Simpler Navigation With Smarter Search, Contextual Tabs, And Better Sidebars
We’ve also reworked the navigation experience from the ground up. The previous system required too many clicks to reach high-value pages, and label inconsistencies often led to confusion.
The new structure simplifies the hierarchy, makes navigation more predictable, and improves scanning with clearer groupings and icon support. We also focused on accessibility — keyboard navigation now works across the board, and color contrast has been tuned to meet WCAG standards.
We made dozens of small but meaningful changes across the board:
- The search results page is simpler, less cluttered, and shows more relevant metadata at a glance.
- Tabs across entities are now more contextual. For example, you’ll see lineage front and center for datasets without cluttered dashboards.
- The sidebar layout now highlights important info like ownership, tags, and glossary terms more clearly — and keeps that info pinned while you explore deeper.
One key design principle behind great developer tools is “progressive disclosure” — you don’t show everything at once, only what’s needed in context. That’s exactly what the new sidebar, tab design, and structured property display enable. These changes reduce clutter and teach users how to use the product more effectively!
Structured Properties Now Offer More Control
One of the more powerful features in DataHub has always been the ability to define structured metadata. But until now, they were hard to find and configure.
With 1.0, we rebuilt how structured properties show up and work.
Properties are now grouped more intentionally, so related fields appear together. This makes it easier to review and update key metadata like ownership, documentation status, or SLA. It’s also much clearer which properties are editable, reducing friction for users who need to make updates.
You now have more control over how and where structured properties appear:
- Choose where properties show up — on search results, entity pages, sidebars, or tabs.
- Decide how they’re displayed — text, tags, links, or markdown.
- Organize them into logical groups to create better clarity and context.
These updates make it easier to surface the right metadata in the right place so teams have a lot more control over how important context shows up and where.
But beyond visibility and control, this change strengthens the feedback loop between producers and consumers of metadata.
The New Stats Tab: Clearer Insights, Faster Decisions
The old Stats tab was useful — but not usable. It buried the signal under too much noise, and there was no clear visual hierarchy.
We want to focus on the value of data by surfacing insights that help users make confident, informed decisions and build lasting trust in what they see.
We completely rebuilt the Stats tab, and that process started with listening to how you actually use those metrics. What do you need at a glance? What helps your team trust the data?
The result is a more focused, actionable view of usage and health. Now, you can see:
- Highlight cards that surface key stats for quick scanning
- Interactive graphs with hover states for precise values
- A much clearer column stats table with details like null values and distinct counts
- Waffle charts that let you visually track change history over time
These improvements came out of direct conversations with the community — mock reviews, feedback loops, and multiple iterations. The waffle chart alone went through several rounds before it struck the right balance of detail and clarity.
(Multiple iterations of the DataHub Change History Graph. A lot of iterations went into this — we hope it hits the mark!)
Contributing to DataHub Just Got Easier
Design systems in OSS aren’t just about consistency — they lower the barrier for new contributors. When visual standards are baked into tokens and components, it translates into fewer review cycles and faster contributions.
In many ways, this redesign is a way to bring consistency and clarity to things we already knew were working.
Much of this redesign is focused on what happens behind the scenes: streamlining how new features are built and helping contributors avoid reinventing the wheel.
We created reusable components for common UI elements. Think empty states, confirmation modals, loading indicators, and documented interaction standards. These additions reduce rework in PRs and make it easier to align on “how things should look.”
We’ve already started applying this design language to new features, and early feedback has been encouraging.
Check out the full video of Anna and Paulina for a deeper look into the new UX experience.
Want To Co-Create The Next Version With Us?
None of these changes would happen without our community. If you’ve ever given feedback, thank you!
As we keep building, we want to involve you even more. We’re launching a User Research Panel, a way for you to get early access to features we’re designing and give feedback that directly shapes what ships.
Everything you share helps make the product better — not just for you but for everyone using DataHub.
Join the DataHub User Research Panel!
Have suggestions? Burning questions you want to ask an expert? Looking to see what others are doing in the community? Join our DataHub Slack community for insights and collaboration!
