Improve Epic Tree UX

Problem to solve

We recently rolled out tree and roadmap views for Epics. These are great. However, they degraded the user experience with epics when they are used purely as a bucket to capture related issues. Now to see the "tree" of issues for that Epic you need to explicitly scroll down and click on tree instead of that list being in the default view.

Intended users

Further details

Proposal

Some thoughts - we could:

1. Make Tree view the default view.
2. Make it possible to provide direct links to Epics that default to tree (similar to what we do with /diff on MRs)

Design proposal

Note: This is not a final design. This is a mockup of what I think would be a good iteration as we first roll out the new epic page to all users. This takes into account two of the biggest pieces of feedback we received-

1. "Tree" is a confusing name
2. It was jarring and confusing that the epics and issues were hidden behind a tab

• Rename Tree to Epics and Issues.
  • It's long, but its very clear about what the purpose is
  • It also leaves it open for future enhancements, for example adding the ancestors into the list
• Move Discussion out of the tabs completely, and place it underneath Epics and issues/Roadmap tabs
  • This will make the change far less jarring. It essentially follows the exact same flow we already have in place for epics, only now the epics and issues are combined
  • the descendants and roadmaps are in tabs at the same level because they both show what the epic comprises.

Future enhancements may include a Jump to discussion button similar to the Jump to unresolved thread in merge requests, so users can easily get to the discussion. Or maybe we could add an option to collapse the entire tree. We will wait to see the feedback we receive from users once this feature has been rolled out.

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