Exploration: Navigation sidebar refresh

What's this issue about?

As I've been reading different SUS verbatim comments, observing what is coming down the road, and dogfooding the navigation sidebar I've come to identify a few ways that the current experience is falling short.

• It's not illustrating the hierarchy of GitLab to help users traverse the platform
• It's sometimes overly simplistic, and not in a sophisticated way. While at other times it’s completely overwhelming.
• The information architecture may conflict with user expectations or mental models
• Context switching, particularly getting to a project is non-obvious
• Placement of certain items or functions isn't coherent

Tasks

• Explore 50 navigation sidebar variations
• See what concepts resonate with others → Share thoughts in Figma or Design Management
• Identify ideas to cherry pick for validation or further refinement
• Prototype a few interactions
• Share a concept more in UserTesting for open ended feedback
• Attempt a spike to simulate the experience

Pitch

GitLab feels heavy because there are so many layers to it. To simplify this and make the user feel like they are in a dedicated platform by drawing inspiration from the IDE experience. The end goal is to direct users to the group/projects where they perform their tasks, anything else is served a layer on top, which makes it easy to understand how to get back and stay anchored to a give context. It will also require removing aspects that work against this paradigm.

Check out the prototype ↗️