Provide a way to easily navigate to the Protected Environments setting through the Environments page

Insight

• Users lacked knowledge of the Protected Environments setting.
• Users expected to be able to navigate to this setting somewhere on the Environments page.
• Users were unfamiliar with how to find the Protected Environments setting within GitLab. They expected this to be accessible through the Environments page instead of CI/CD settings.
• Users who were unsure about this task would go the docs site as a last resort, but otherwise these users would have failed or given up.

Supporting evidence

• "I was expecting to be able to change approvers directly from the Environments page. So once I drill down into development and hit Edit, I would have expected to be able to change the approvers right there. -P7"
• "I don’t particularly like that this is hidden so far away or that there isn’t an easy way to view it from within other parts of the UI to say who has access or to quickly get back to this [setting]." -P10
• "I don’t think it was immediately obvious where to go for the environment. I expected to find it under the Environments section. Then I had to use Google to read the documentation to find out where to look for that." -P18
• Highlight reel in Dovetail of users performing the task of creating a new production release in GitLab

Action

When a user goes to edit an environment, we provide a link to the protected environments settings:

Proposal

• Sub Copy: Environments allow you to track deployments of your application. To protect this environment, go to the CI/CD settings [Protected environments] (link to protected environment settings) section.

Resources

• 🕊 Dovetail project
• 👣 Research epic

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