A couple months ago, we launched a completely redesigned Heroku status site. Since design is important to us and, we think, to many of you, we're taking a break from our usual blog posts to dig into the Heroku approach to visual product design.

Read on to experience the twists and turns on the way to the final design and let us know in the comments if you want to see more posts like this.

The Premise

For platform providers, a status site is a way to build trust with your customers, and in some cases, future customers. Heroku is no different. Our existing status site hadn't been updated in over two years and was showing its age. We took this as an opportunity to go back to...

Developers like you deploy code to hundreds of thousands of apps every month on the Heroku platform. Some of these are production apps which serve hundreds of millions or even billions of requests per month. Uptime of the platform is critical for such apps.

We want to achieve the sustained reliability that these apps require. But when there are incidents that impact uptime, we want to maximize our transparency and accountability to you and all developers on the platform.

Today, we’re launching a completely redesigned status.heroku.com, which provides real-time status of the platform, the ability to sign up for email or SMS notification of incidents, and recent uptime history in both...