Exploration: simplified navigation between projects

Purpose

Since launching the new navigation, we have heard consistent feedback that users struggle to navigate between projects in GitLab (internal).

Problem to solve

How users perceive the ease of navigating from one project to another in GitLab needs to improve. This exploration does not need to address ease of navigating from e.g. a profile page to a project.

Task

Explore solutions that allow users to move easily between the projects they rely on. These will be used to inform upcoming solution validation.

Brainstorming

Look for boring solutions wherever possible. What is the simplest thing we could do to allow users to get to other projects quickly? For example:

• groupglobal search recently made dramatic improvements to the performance of the "Recently used project" section of the command palette. Can we drive reliably people to use this improved behavior?
• How can we take advantage of starred projects? Can we expose those from an element in the nav?
• Thinking ahead to a homepage experience, is there a reasonable iteration we could make to the "My work" context that surfaces important projects?

Outcome

We will be carrying over three concepts into solution validation. One is the existing experience to use as a control and baseline and the other two are different dropdown variations.

Both of the new designs include a more pronounced header which isolates itself from the body of the context. This helps prevent it from looking the label of a dropdown input. Each of these designs showed promise in early unmoderated testing and different levels of complexity for implementation.

There are two different dropdowns being tested as well. One is carrying over the former context switcher, and another makes it possible to toggle between projects/groups.

Control	Variable A	Variable B
Link 🔗	Link 🔗	Link 🔗

See the design management section for other designs that were explored or browse the pages in Figma.