New issue with minimal friction and in context
Problem
- We want to encourage people to create issues. Issues are the lifeblood of ideation. How can we create issues quickly? Have the least friction?
- We want to create issues in context. Somebody sees something on a page in GitLab. They have a lightbulb idea. We want to be able to capture that idea not only with the least friction, but also with the relevant information in context.
- Currently this is difficult because issue creation is tantamount to filling out a very large web form. And all the fields are empty.
- We already solve these problems in part. We can create an issue from an unresolved discussion. There's often a New issue button nearby. There's other parts in the GitLab workflow where we can naturally extend GitLab issue creation. But how can we solve this problem in a generic fashion so that you can always create an issue, anywhere, anytime?
Product goal
Try something super extreme and out of this world. Don't be conservative. Try to solve the problem in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable, to see how our users react. Once we get some feedback, we can discuss lessons learned, think more deeply about the problem, and then build it "correctly" afterward.
Crazy design
- Anywhere in GitLab, you can highlight some text.
- There is some contextual UI when you do highlighting. Right click for example. Then from that UI, you can create an issue immediately.
- The issue is created with the highlighted text as the issue description, and then you are redirected to the issue page itself.
- You definitely don't need to fill out any web form. The issue is just created. It's not just pre-filling the issue creation page. It's creating the issue right away.
- In this case, the issue title would be entered by the system. For example, the issue title could be
Issue 12345 (Update me)
. - There is some UI to help with discoverability of the feature.
- In this reference design, you highlight text in a Google doc, and you get some contextual actions: