Creating a Merge Request from the WebIDE should leave you in the WebIDE
Problem to solve
When a user commits in the WebIDE and then creates a Merge Request this action takes the user out of the WebIDE. This discourages Commit Early, Commit Often behavior in the WebIDE as the flow is broken for users and they have to return to the WebIDE and load their branch to resume working.
Proposal
After clicking on Commit with having the option to start a new merge request enabled, the right sidebar of the Web IDE will pop up and contain the UI for a new merge request. When the merge request is created, that sidebar now contains the title and description of the merge request, which is already implemented but so far not very well known.
Rough sketches flow
| Commit | New merge request | Overview of merge request |
|---|---|---|
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@katokpara As the right sidebar will pop up at the same time as the content in the left sidebar changes, it might make sense to do a quick usability study as follow up to validate whether users notice it. If there are problems and people do not notice it, we can switch to displaying that screen in the left sidebar, as that would be more obvious.
| Commit | New merge request | Committed & merge request created | Overview of merge request |
|---|---|---|---|
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Visual Design of new merge request in both sidebars
I literally just copied the New merge request design from our mobile view and pasted it into the right sidebar. That way, we can hopefully keep as much consistency between these two versions.
| Right sidebar | Left sidebar |
|---|---|
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Technical considerations
We will have to look into whether it would be possible/worth it to also keep the last part of the merge request page up to date in case somebody keeps committing to the branch before submitting the merge request.
If that behavior is already built in, we can absolutely keep it, otherwise I don't think it would be worth any extra effort and we should just leave it out in this version of the New merge request page.