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Add a "Home" item to Your Work navigation

Summary

As part of introducing a personalized homepage to GitLab, we'll need to surface that homepage within the navigation. After investigating various options, we're proposing to start minimally, by adding a Home item into the existing Your work navigation.

Background

Issue / Larger epic

The homepage is meant to solve a longstanding problem within GitLab: having a single place where you can see all of your important GitLab activities, making it easier for you to pick up where you left off. Ultimately, the goal is for the homepage to help people navigate GitLab's large surface area and stay focused on what matters most to them.

In order for the homepage to meet those goals, it needs to be easily accessible. Users can already access the homepage by clicking on the Tanuki icon but, once that icon is clicked on, this change will directly surface the homepage at the top of the Your work list.

How many users will be impacted by this proposed change?

  • Limited
  • Moderate
  • All users

What is the product maturity stage of the associated feature?

  • Experimental
  • Beta
  • General availability

How often do you expect an average GitLab user (not just your target persona) to reach for this functionality?

  • Several times a day
  • Once a day
  • A few times a week
  • Once a week
  • Less than once a week

Approaches considered

As part of Explore navigation options for homepage (#515199 - closed), we considered a number of alternatives:

Justification

We used the following methods to gather feedback on our design concepts:

  • 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 ran unmoderated testing to test 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.

Given this feedback, we are recommending moving forward with adding the homepage to the top of the existing Your work section.

Note: the homepage will be released internally behind a feature flag so, if we get additional feedback about the suitability of this approach, we can continue to modify it before a more general release.

Review checklist

Requester

  • Review the handbook page for navigation.
  • Add relevant information to the issue description detailing your proposal, including usage and business drivers.
  • List at least two other places you considered to introduce your feature.
  • Add relevant designs to the Design Management area of the issue.
  • Ensure your UI suggestion align with the Documentation Style Guide.
  • Engage Technical Writing. They can help craft a term that best describes the feature(s) you’re proposing.
  • Follow the product development workflow validation process to ensure you are solving a well understood problem and that the proposed change is understandable and non-disruptive to users. Navigation-specific research is mandatory for additions or when restructuring.
  • Engage the Foundations Product Manager for approval. The Foundations DRI (@jtucker_gl) will work with UX partners in product design, research, and technical writing, as applicable.
  • Consider whether you need to communicate the change somehow, or if you will have an interim period in the UI where your item will live in more than one place.
  • Ensure engineers are familiar with the implementation steps for navigation.

Foundations Product Manager

  • Confirm proposal has necessary information
  • Schedule design review for next milestone

Foundations Product Designer

  • Confirm Pajamas guidelines are followed
  • Confirm a11y needs are addressed
  • Confirm burden of proof supplied for stated scope of access
Edited by Amelia Bauerly