Create user flows with designs inside of GitLab
Problem to solve
Our Design Management features allow us to upload individual designs and comment on these. Extending this to somehow visualize user flows could greatly enhance the value of this feature. Some users already figured out that they can get this done by using the Mermaid markdown functionality.
However, Mermaid currently does not allow for images to be used as nodes, due to securityLevel
being set to strict
instead of loose
. If we would either change this or found a way to still allow images to be used as nodes, we could already enable all of our users to create user flows like this, where a click on one of the images would lead you to the individual design, which would be a huge improvement and a first step towards letting users simply create user flows within issues:
How this could work in a future iteration
When we have implemented design unfurling #202692, we could see whether there might be a way to extend mermaid and just display the design whenever a GitLab design management link is set as click target for a node.
As another follow-up, we could also see whether we might be able to build a very easy custom UI to create/add/move nodes without having to write mermaid markdown, as that might be a barrier for new designers starting to use this feature.
An additional follow up would be utilizing the fact that Figma and Sketch allow 3rd party plugins to detect whether there are prototype hotspots. If so, GitLab can automatically create flows based on which screens link together via hotspots and even show directionality.