Tidy up and simplify the "+" menu in the top nav bar
Current content in the "+" menu dropdown is inconsistent and probably causes more confusion than good. Here's how the content changes based on where the user is.
Inside a group | Inside a project | On the homepage |
---|---|---|
Proposal
Let's clean up this menu dropdown and make it a true top nav bar item. Most of the confusion comes from placing non-top-level items inside it. For example, when a user is inside a group, we show the "This group" section with "New project" and "New epic" items.
User's point of view:
- What group is "This group"? It's not clear from the label, the user needs to find it elsewhere in the UI.
- What if the user wants to use an option he previously saw in the menu when they were inside a project? "New issue" for example?
- Why is the content changing?
- Why am I not seeing the options I saw there before? (When on the homepage)
- What is the "GitLab" section? Am I adding new stuff to the GitLab project?
Our point of view:
- Why do we include non-global elements in a global section (top navbar)?
- Why do we try to fix our broken UI elsewhere by adding things to global navigation? Creating an issue in a project should be accessible from the Project Details page but it isn't. Or maybe it could be an item in the left sidebar, in the "Issues" section? It makes sense to be there and it's easily accessible. It's a local nav item and it should be in the local nav, not the global one.
- There are too many items in this menu dropdown for it to be a "quick add new" menu.
This is how GitHub does it:
It has 5 options, and they're all on the global level. "New gist" takes the user to a different website which is odd and confusing, but it's still on the global level.
Let's tidy up this menu so that we can experiment with adding other global items to it, but let's try to restrict it to up to 5 items:
Recommended next steps:
- review usage data for this menu (if available), if not
- set up usage data collection
- get feedback from 5 users on whether they use the menu, if yes, how and how often. Alternatively, we could ask relatively new users what they think will happen if they click for each of the options in the menu.
- tidy up the content of the menu to 3 or 4 global items that make sense to be there
- experiment with adding 1 or 2 additional global items