Skip to content

Explore navigation options for homepage

Problem

In https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/508933+, we explored design concepts for the homepage.

Closely related to the homepage design, is how we'll either utilize or update the existing navigation when the homepage is introduced. Some questions we want to answer:

  • Do we want to place this in Your Work, and keep the side-nav visible?
    • If so, how should the hierarchy work between the homepage and the rest of the pages within Your Work?
    • Should we make clean-ups to the Your Work section as part of this work?
  • Alternately, do we want to hide the side-bar, and thus locate the homepage "above" Your Work in the hierarchy?

Ideas we explored

Revisions to the Your Work nav, options where the side-bar is hidden (example 1, example 2), and possible longer-term, larger revisions to the navigation (example).

Research + Considerations

  • As part of our homepage solution validation research, we received feedback on two versions of the homepage prototype, one with the Your Work side-navigation present, and one a more minimal top-navigation. People universally preferred the version with the side-navigation. This is consistent with the feedback we received internally, as well. We have thus concluded that the top-navigation approach isn't the right approach, right now.
  • In terms of cleaning up the side-navigation items within Your work - we tested a version of the side-navigation where the items within Your work are grouped, and the feedback was very mixed. The conclusion is that grouping the items isn't yet a clear enough improvement to justify the change.
  • We've determined the team likely doesn't have capacity to make larger revisions to the navigation this year.

Recommendation

We thus recommend we move forward with adding the homepage to the top of the existing Your work section:

Default_view__1_

While we do think there are improvements to be made to the IA of Your work, we don't yet have a solution that's strong enough to justify the change at this point. We'll continue exploring improvements to Your work separately from the homepage work, as part of https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/17279.

Edited by Amelia Bauerly