In October, we were hard at work at improving our UX in a few key areas (and, as always, fixing bugs and making performance enhancements!). Some of the highlights we launched include:
- A new UX for quickly starting a live interview with a candidate.
- Enhancing our IDE for front-end tasks with better previews.
- Adding more transparent statistics to your task library.
Quickstart for live interviews
We now provide a faster way to get started with CodeSignal Interview. Interviews don't have to set up a task ahead of time, they can go straight to the interview link and get started.
- When an interviewer enters a new interview, they will see a task selection panel on the left-hand side.
- They can click on one of the Quickstart buttons to begin with a basic type of task.
- Or, they can click on "Select Tasks" and find an existing task in their library (see Choosing Interview Questions).
Improvements to our front-end assessment experience
- All kinds of front-end tasks (including front-end Filesystem tasks) now have a live preview that automatically refreshes when the code changes. The live preview is on by default and can be toggled off.
- Previews can now be opened in a new tab so that you can explore the webpage more fully.
The debug experience for front-end tasks has also been improved:
- Sass/Less syntax errors are reported to the UI
- Source maps are included with the preview to allow for easier debugging
- Line numbers for error messages will match the original source code
More statistics in the task library
Whereas before tasks in your library showed a difficulty rating of low to high, they now show more transparent statistics. You will see the task's estimated solve time, as well as difficulty stats that show the total attempts and the percentage of candidates that solved the task.
Other updates
Here's a laundry list of everything else we pushed live in October, grouped by product area:
Certify
- Fixed the display/sort order of "Completed On" date
- Updated copy of the "your result has been certified" email to candidates to make it feel less celebratory (hopefully preventing confusion where candidates thought it meant they would move on to the next stage of a hiring funnel).
- Fixed a bug where sometimes a publicly available result would be shared with a company even if the candidate autoshared a session and then had that session not certified.
- Invitations will no longer expire during an active test session.
- "Test started" will now be shown as a possible progress stage in the Pending tab.
- Will now show "Submitted" in the header to show if the current task has been submitted at least once.
- Fixed bug where it was possible for Safari users to pause screen sharing after starting the test and refreshing the page.
- Now, when downloading a PDF report, users have the option to download an anonymized report with name and email stripped out.
Test
- Optimized loading performance of the overall results dashboard.
- Will now show "Submitted" in the header to show if the current task has been submitted at least once.
- Now, when downloading a PDF report, users have the option to download an anonymized report with name, email stripped out.
- Old score range labels will now be removed whenever score range labels are updated.
Interview
- Fixed bug where after a disconnection and reconnection, errors might be shown and presence information (name in the footer & in the video call panel) might not be restored.
- The language will no longer change to the candidate's when the candidate joins for the first time.
- Cursor jump issue has been fixed.
- Fixed bug where "presence information" of interview participants (name in footer, in video call panel) would disappear & errors would be thrown during a temporary disconnection.
- Added a "noGuestInterview" feature toggle that can be used to disable guest interviewees for an organization.
Tasks
- The "enable network access" flag can now be toggled on/off through the task creation UI, which lets users design tasks that call a public API.
- Now, default React libraries will appear in the frontend libraries panel when creating a free-frontend task (for example, if React and ReactDOM libraries will be automatically included as a result of using JSX or TSX).
- Filesystem tasks: Now, default starter code in "main.sh" includes the proper compilation and execution commands for compiled languages. (Before, only had the compilation command.)
- Task library: The label for the difficulty sort option has been renamed to "solve rate" to more closely reflect the meaning.
IDE
- Fixed a bug in recovery tasks that could lead to users seeing "Something went wrong!" if they made whitespace changes outside of the recovery issue, then tried to submit. Now, they'll see the diff modal prompting them to reverse changes.
- Fixed a bug in output/console output truncation logic that could cause crashes if logs were too large.
- Now, cursor position should be saved if you go back and forth between tabs.
- Fixed some scenarios where the task description panel might appear empty (if the network connection died, or when switching tasks while on certain tabs).
- For single-function C++ tasks, the "std::" prefix has been removed from parameter types to reduce user confusion.
- Fixed an issue where "undo" history could persist across multiple files with the same extension (i.e., Cmd/Ctrl + Z could reset to an entirely different file).
Test Center
- Autoshare page for when candidates have one or more companies request their results:
- Now shows whether each request requires proctoring.
- Now allows proctoring opt-in even if proctoring is not required.
- Now requires proctoring if you choose to share with at least one company for whom proctoring is required.
- Fixed issue where the wrong cooldown was being shown in the Test Center if a user's prior attempt had not been certified.
API
- Plagiarism labels will now be returned from GraphQL in a way that matches what we show in the UI more closely: "none" if we detect no plagiarism, "null" if the task is not eligible for plagiarism-checking.
- Company ID is now optional for "company" queries in GraphQL.
Admin
- The dev mailing list should now receive a weekly digest of out-of-date compiler versions for our most popular languages.