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Give users more feedback when they have successfully created a release

Insight

  • Users did not get clear feedback from the user interface when they manually created a new Release.

Screen_Shot_2022-10-25_at_5.06.07_PM

Supporting evidence

  • "It’s easy to create a Release, but I’m not used to how to check if the Release was properly created or if it’s properly deployed to the correct Environment." -P9
  • Highlight reel in Dovetail of users performing the task of creating a new production release in GitLab

Action

  • Provide users a success message in the form of a success alert, that they have successfully created a release.
Alert Proposal
Screen_Shot_2022-11-22_at_8.59.54_AM

Content: You’ve successfully created {Release name}.

Technical proposal

The create release action calls a graphql mutation, checks the response and in case of a success redirects the user to the release details page making a full page refresh. Since the decision wether the action was successful is taken on the frontend, it would make sense for a frontend to implement the logic for showing a flash notification as well. To achieve that for a full page refresh scenario, we need to store persist some sort of a flag indicating that the release was just created, and clean this flag afterwards.

This can be achieved either adding an anchor hashtag or query parameter to the URL, or by storing this flag in a session storage. For both cases the code calling the flash notification must clean up that value to not show a message for an existing release when the page is refreshed.

As an example of a similar behavior you can look at the delete confirmation toast on releases page: app/assets/javascripts/releases/components/app_index.vue:176

Relevant source files:

app/assets/javascripts/releases/stores/modules/edit_new/actions.js:126
app/assets/javascripts/releases/components/release_block.vue
app/assets/javascripts/flash.js:128

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 Andrei Zubov