Improve settings pages design by prioritizing content: Repository settings
We seem to be relying on two contrasting approaches when it comes to designing pages with a lot of content: we either show everything (issue view) or break content down and hide it in expandable sections (settings pages in general). I think we need to find a balance between the two by starting to prioritize content. The principle that can guide is in such cases is the 80/20 principle.
For the settings page case: can we prioritize 20% of the content that 80% of users look for and only hide the rest?
Recently received feedback from a user on Hacker News:
Repo settings are buried under expand links. This did not make the page more usable, it made it so I had to guess where the setting I want is.
The problem with this approach is that we need to break content down and then group related things. By doing that and hiding it behind an expandable section we then need to come up with a label that encompasses the content of the section. That usually results in generic labels and users wondering where is the thing that they're looking for.
Proposal
Change the way we handle settings pages by prioritizing content. We can assume what users look for on simpler and shorter pages (group settings in the above example) but will probably need support from UX research to do that on more complex pages (Admin settings).
We already started discussing how the UX of these pages can be improved in this issue, I'm opening this new issue to continue that discussion.
Current Repository settings page
Solution
TBD