Left Side Navigation Improvements: Product Discovery
Problem to solve
We concluded that the research conducted as part of ux-research#108 (closed) does not support ordering the left sidenav with GitLab's DevOps stages as top-level items due to how the results compared to previous tests, additional usability concerns, and feedback from users.
However, there are still improvements that can be made to the project and group-level left sidenav based on all the findings. The purpose of this issue is to continue to take a closer look at the naming of features/categories and identify opportunities for incremental changes that can align our UI with our DevOps stages.
Proposal
Action recommendations from UX Research
-
Complete the recommendations from ux-research#43 (closed):
- At the Group level:
-
Planning
category that contains Epics, Milestones, Roadmap (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/43431) -
Statistics
category that contains Contribution Analytics and Members
-
- At the Project level:
-
Statistics
category that contains Cycle Analytics, Contributors, Members, Charts (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/43432).
-
- At the Group level:
-
Discuss adding headers to the left sidebar: ux-research#108 (comment 138907088)
Create a system for categorization and prioritizing new nav items
- Conclude discussion around whether we should move
Registry
underPackages
or create a top-levelArtifacts
category that contains both items. (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/7932) - Discuss how to house security features in navigation: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/7742
- Explore how to group items in Admin>Monitoring: ux-research#181
- Rename "Operations" under Settings on left menu https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/58183
Discuss the importance of promoting new features vs findability of commonly used features
- Dependency proxy as a top-level item: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/11639
What does success look like, and how can we measure that?
We identify opportunities for incremental changes that can align our UI with our DevOps stages and create issues for implementation.