Redesign group overview UI: Discovery
Problem to solve
Right now, the Overview landing page of a GitLab group is not very intuitive. It does not provide much context about what you are looking at, is very similar to the project overview (due to the re-used header UI) and has a potential to improve information architecture and structure.
Right now, it typically only lists the subgroup hierarchies and child projects.
Further details
Example of a subgroup overview page via attached screenshot.
Solution
As usual, I'm attaching an MVC (we should make the group page consistent with the project page ASAP) and explored further ahead.
MVC | Vision |
---|---|
7 days overview
I would like to explore the possibiliity of adding a '7 days overview'. This should be helpful to all types of users described above. It can give a good sense of general activity in the group but it can also link to content that would potentially be really interesting for members and owners. The goal of this overview is to give a general overview of activity and have the possibility to drill further down. Here's what I imagine the sections would link to:
Pinned projects
For now, I'm thinking this could be useful to members and owners as quick links to most important projects (great for onboarding new people), but it can also be useful for non-members looking up a public group. This way the could immeditely see which are the most important projects of the group and drill down.
The idea is that a group could have up to 6 projects pinned to their group overview page.
As all of these suggestions are subject to user feedback, I'm open to replacing this section with 'Most active projects' if the users would find that more useful instead.
Epics overview
How do we provide an overview of currently active epics that is useful to group owners and members? We can show the three epics that have due dates in current month and sort them by issues still open. We can show how many issues were closed, how many are still open and how many active MRs there are. Clickin 'View all' would direct the user to the Epics page and sort them by due date.
Customizable
Adding all of this information could be too much for some users. Maybe they find a certain new section useful but another not. We could offer the possibility of hiding certain sections (and also allow to re-enable them in the Group settings).
Next steps
- Create an implementation issue for the MVC and implement it in 11.6
- get user feedback on the 'vision' mockups in 11.6 if UX research have capacity --> ux-research#113 (closed)
- iterate further in 11.7
- if something from the mockups receives really positive feedback we could create a separate implementation issue and start implementing it in 11.7 already (without waiting for further iterations)
What does success look like, and how can we measure that?
(If no way to measure success, link to an issue that will implement a way to measure this)