Card sorting for GitLab Ops Docs
Problem
Currently, GitLab Monitoring documentation is very difficult to navigate. The information we're providing is often fragmented and incomplete.
It's a big problem, because good documentation is incredibly important in helping our users learn how to set up and use our product. Poor documentation can lead to new users getting absolutely confused and stuck.
Some of the most obvious issues are:
- Many of the navigation links don't match the pages they lead to. In other words, the categories don't always match the topics they contain.
- Main nav and breadcrumbs don't match.
- The documentation doesn't follow an intuitive hierarchy.
- Documentation is incomplete.
Let's change that!
Who is the target user of the feature?
- Delaney (Development Team Lead)
- Sasha (Software Developer)
- Devon (DevOps Engineer)
- Sidney (Systems Administrator)
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Proposal We've been documenting and analyzing the current architecture of the Monitoring Docs in this Mural Board to help surface some of the problems with information architecture and content.
As the next step, we'd like to conduct an expert card sorting exercise to figure out a way to improve the documentation IA.
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Results - Read through the summary of our findings.
- Check out the card sort Mural board.
Next Steps
This study is meant to inform the overall structure of the Operations documentation. The next steps would be to:
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Discuss the results -
Collaborate on a new IA for the Ops documentation -
Implement the changes in GitLab Docs (TBD) -
Conduct solution validation and iterate as necessary