2019Q2 UX scorecard recommendations for setting up GitLab-CI
Update on next steps
Improvements following this issue's recommendations and the insights of &2227 (closed) from the Q3 validation and reevaluation will be collected under &2288 (closed)!
Tasks
-
Brainstorm opportunities to fix or improve areas of the experience explored in #480 (closed) -
Use the findings from the Emotional Grading scale to determine areas of immediate focus. For example, if parts of the experience received a “Negative” Emotional Grade, consider addressing those first. -
Create an issue for each recommendation and link them to the corresponding JTBD recommendations issue. Think iteratively, and create dependencies where appropriate, remembering that sometimes the order of what we release is just as important as what we release. -
If you need to break recommendations into phases or over multiple milestones, create multiple epics and use the Category Maturity Definitions in the title of each epic: Minimal, Viable, Complete, or Lovable.
Baseline Review Summary
Setting up GitLab CI is currently an unguided effort with very subtly cues on how to proceed or initiate. This forces the user to know beforehand what to expect in order to be able to progress.
✍ Brainstorm board in Mural.ly
Recommendation themes
From the journey map at #480 (closed) certain pain points and insights have come up. These generally can fall into 4 themes which we'll be able to approach holistically. Depending on the steps rated with a negative emotional grading and the abundance of problems found certain themes might have a bigger impact upon improving the experience than others. Based on that we might want to consider prioritizing. The following list is ordered from top to bottom in terms of potential impact:
- User guidance
- Giving feedback
- General Usability problems
- Offering required context
1. User guidance
This is the most important problem to fix. Both finding out about GitLab-CI and offering guidance along the way towards setting the user up for success seems to be lacking.
If solved this should improve user adoption and understanding of the configuration itself making it more adaptable to any situation the user might have.
2. Giving feedback
This applies to both reporting timely on pipeline status on every step as well as indicating when a CI configuration is not working out inside, for example, an edit experience.
If solved this will improve trust from the user in the system making it more likely that they will not break off the user journey and accomplish their tasks more efficiently.
3. General Usability problems
These problems can be fixed individually, though it might be possible to fit multiple of them into the same milestone. These are small problems that stand apart from each other but all add up to a loveable experience.
- https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/55999
- https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/65842
- https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/65843
- https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/65844
- https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/65845
4. Offering required context
This problem is fixed around offering related context in situations where the current information on the page is not enough to determine what needs changing in order to fix the CI configuration after a problem has surfaced. Currently, the user needs to perform additional unnecessary steps in order to be able to do this.
Automating these steps will allow us to make the user journey more efficient, increasing the trust of the user that they are on the right path.