Design of committer information pattern
Problems to solve
Our typical headline for user information and actions that consists of Real name - Username - Action Description - Timestamp - Developer/Maintainer status - Action buttons has a couple of potential issues:
Developer/Maintainer status
I might miss some specific information why this aspect is so important that we have to surface it for every individual comment, but my assumption would be that adding this information to the popover with user information could be sufficient.
Proposal Moving the Maintainer/Developer status into the user information popover.
Commented as repeating and implied information
Adding commented in the headline complicates the UI unnecessarily, there is no added value as it is already implied and there is no other option than commented. This is a point that @sbouchard1 already commented on and where we assume the most up to date version is visible on GitLab.com and where the Sketch file is outdated, but we should make a conscious decision and add the discussion design as region to the Design System or at least update it in the Sketch files.
Proposal Removing commented from the headline.
User Profile link broken apart
The link to the user profile goes over multiple elements (real name and username) that are styled in different ways and even have different hover behavior. The following screenshot is the UI when I hover over the username, not the actual real name of the user.
Proposal I would love to have a discussion on whether it would be possible to remover either the username or the real name from this headline. Having both here feels to me like we want to satisfy everyone, but I can absolutely see that there might be good reasons to have both, so if anybody has them, I would love to hear more about it. If removing one of these elements won't work, we could consider styling them both the same way, as breaking a link apart and applying different designs on hover feels weird to me.
Proposed design
Putting together all of these, plus the fact that we already made the real name of the user bold in the recent discussion redesign, we could change the pattern the following way:
- Moving both the full name and the developer/maintainer status into the popover
- Removing
commented
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- I also proposed removing the functionality to individually resolve comments, as it can lead to very confusing situations and we're not sure whether the added functionality outweighs the added complexity, but that should stay in a separate issue https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/61870