Reorganize content in docs.gitlab.com home page
The Problem
The docs site home page design is due for a refresh, particularly how content is organized.
Some of the current links on the home page take users several levels into the site. We need to rethink the links and make sure we're using high-value, frequently accessed pages.
Proposal
We need to improve the findability of content on the site by making the categories of content (the "buckets") more clear. This is probably by the type of documentation, the typical way of organizing enterprise docs. The docs search facets reflect these buckets:
I believe we can move much of the home page content to secondary ("bucket") pages.
Organizing the docs by these buckets is more assumption than evidence. Confidence level ~70%. Homepage change for this is estimate to be low risk.
However, we are quite confident in the order of children (pages/subsections) within those buckets (currently in the docs left nav). We would use that same order and relationships in the homepage when displaying the children.
We have to keep the popular pages in there, but we actually don’t know if it works.
Research
- We did an informal, small first click test with a prototype that sectioned the docs into those main buckets with a horizontal navigation at the top (screenshot) — it was inconclusive and the perhaps not reliable.
- The % of new users in the docs is going up. The # of people that come to the docs site is going up.
- We don’t have info on what kind of user (new/experienced) visits which pages. We don’t know if new users visit the homepage more than experienced users — but we can extrapolate that new users visit it more.