Better define upgrade recommended and upgrade available

Insight

This came from the Runner Fleet FY23 CMS. Many participants were confused by the terminology upgrade recommended and upgrade available and weren't sure why all runners had recommended upgrades, but not available upgrades. They saw this as a bug, considering all runners had upgrades available regardless, but none had that label. Also, those who weren't familiar with the gitlab instance upgrade flow had some assumptions around the connection between instance updates and runner updates terminology, so it was a bit easier for them to assume.

P.S. The task was "find how many outdated runners you have." which may have tripped them up more.

Supporting evidence

It wasn't clear the difference between available and recommended the curious stuff. If that's, if I feel that it was available, there's no, no results. And I would have expected to have them update status available in my mind means an upgrade is available. Okay. Which is clearly true for the other ones. So again, up-to-date is clear. We have a, well, not here, but the last one, that was five, 15.2. Okay. But again, I'm not sure if I'm making sense. So the difference between available and recommended. Okay. It's not, it's not clear to me. So this is why I went with the, with the recommended, because I saw that it was the listed, the, all the ones that are in need of upgrade.

it means that there's a, there's a bugthere because I tried with the upgrade status available and none were returned, but clearly there's actually, all of them should be in the red status available

So on the, on the last task, I, I didn't use the, this filter here. So I, on this task, I'm trying to, to look for upgrade or something like it's I have to choose between recommended or available, to do the update.

So I think recommended it's more critical to be looking into than an available one.

I couldn't answer your question because, or I, I just gave you the ones that had a recommended upgrade status, not, not available. So if I would need to know now all the up runners that have an available upgrade, I, I couldn't use this feature cuz it, it, it wouldn't work or it doesn't work in the moment at the moment I, or I, I would see it as that, I don't know, maybe may, maybe it means something else that I don't think about. But at least to me available here would, would mean that, that there is some version higher than this available to be used.

Probably security related reasons. Same as as you do with your actual, like the version of GitLab that there are versions that are strongly recommended as you, when you go to the dashboard, you will see the, the version here, and this says up to date, but this will say, say update ASAP if there is an actual security issue. So update recommended here to me more signals that, I mean, it, it, it's not in red so maybe it's not the most critical issue.

Action

Complete Add popovers to single stat upgrade items for r... (#369346 - closed)

Resources

Tasks

  • Assign this issue to the appropriate Product Manager, Product Designer, or UX Researcher.
  • Add the appropriate Group (such as ~"group::source code") label to the issue. This helps identify and track actionable insights at the group level.
  • Link this issue back to the original research issue in the GitLab UX Research project and the Dovetail project.
  • Adjust confidentiality of this issue if applicable
Edited by Gina Thisse