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Permanently Move Pages Menu entry under "Deploy"

What does this MR do and why?

This MR moves the menu entry for GitLab Pages from "Settings" to "Deployments" (old navigation) or "Deploy" (if using Super Sidebar).

In an Experiment, followed by a survey, we determined that users find "Deployments" to be a more reasonable place for Settings:

Survey results

Please see the Experiment issue for the full reasoning.

Note that the experiment was conducted using the old navigation experience. According to the survey results, I would consider the most appropriate new place for the Menu entry to be the similarly-named "Deploy".

This headline did not exist when the super sidebar was newly introduced, which is why the experiment entry briefly ended up in "Operate".

This MR removes the experiment Feature Flag and makes the move to "Deployments"/"Deploy" permanent.

How does this affect users?

Currently 50% of users are in the experiment group (with the FF toggled on), so they are already experiencing this change. The FF has not been toggled off after conclusion of the experiment to prevent those users from experiencing too many changes.

Unfortunately, when the Super Sidebar was newly introduced, it was lacking a "Deploy" category, so Pages ended up in "Operate" for users in the experiment group. This MR should resolve that.

See the table below for a specific set of changes, depending on whether the user is in the experiment group and whether they use the super sidaber

User was in the experiment group User was in the control group
User has the old navigation experience no change Menu entry moves from "Settings" to "Deployments"
User has the new navigation experience Fix: Menu entry moves from "Operate" to "Deploy" Menu entry moves from "Settings" to "Deploy"

Note that the documentation and callout specifies the link as being in "Deploy". I believe this is sufficiently unambiguous to also work with the old navigation's title "Deployments", so this has not been adapted to simplify the messaging.

Screenshots or screen recordings

Before After

How to set up and validate locally

  1. Open a project that has Pages enabled
  2. If not already done, enable the new navigation experience by clicking on your avatar and toggling "New Navigation Experience"
  3. Verify that the Pages Menu entry is now under "Deploy"
  4. Disable the new Navigation experience (again)
  5. Verify that the Pages Menu entry is now under "Deployments"

MR acceptance checklist

This checklist encourages us to confirm any changes have been analyzed to reduce risks in quality, performance, reliability, security, and maintainability.

Related to #373547 (closed)

Edited by Janis Altherr

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