GitLab UI Enhancement Proposals
Hi,
just a few proposals on making gitlab more awesome, UI design wise. I hope I'm not too much rechewing what others have sent to you but rather that this is helpful :)
Labels, Weights, Assignees
When I want to change the labels, weight or assignee - why do I have to first click "edit" and then do the change? Why not keep it editable in the first place?
Issue Voting
I personally think the "thums up", "thumbs down" and smileys buttons to vote for issues are at least weirdly placed. It feels wrong to give them and own row taking up so much space. I can see how it makes sense for them to be there for you after you read the issue body, still they interrupt the reading flow right in the middle with an action making the UI more complicated.
- One possibility to place them would be in the side bar, e.g. right above the "Assignee" field. It wouldn't interrupt the reading flow and still be accessible during the whole reading flow (as the bar scrolls with you).
- Place them beneath the
Add Comment
andClose and Comment
buttons at the bottom. Users that think about writing+1
or so will see this and thus may use such a feature. It would fit there very naturally IMO - voting on an issue or dropping smileys is an individual opinion, not a state change of the issue, and this close to a "comment".
Editing Issue Titles, Comments and Bodies
Editing issue titles, comments and bodies could actually be simplified. We did something like that for GNOME Boxes: we had a label and if you click on it, the label transforms into an editable textbox. If you introduce a whole other view for editing you make the whole process more complicated for the user. The user sees an issue, he sees content. If he wants to read it, he may do so. If he wants to change it, he clicks on the content he want to change (e.g. on a pen beneath the title), then types. One click only, no new page, no distraction, in place editing, through a nice little pen symbol this gets very obvious too. (IMO the pen should just be a hint for users that don't expect that and are wondering how to do stuff. Clicking on the title could work as well as if the title were editable the whole time.)
Markdown preview.
Is there any reason of not doing a live preview for markdown? That would encourage people to rather try out things and they wouldn't need to click the preview button anymore. Phabricator e.g. does this and I guess it's not that hard technically. It can make something as simple as commenting even more intuitive: already while the user is typing his comment, you can render the comment live above the text field, greyed out a bit and marked as preview. When he hits Add Comment
, the Preview
mark disappears, the text box empties and that's it. He drafted the comment, could already see where it's placed in the discussion and how it'd look. He didn't have to click on any Preview
button and happily enjoyed GitLabs full Markdown capabilities :)