Left side navigation ordered by DevOps stage

What questions are you trying to answer?

Our left nav, in projects and groups, is ordered in a particular way.

We're slowly, but steadily organising the company around DevOps stages. Would it make sense to reflect this in the product?

Are there other, better ways of organising the links that are there?

E.g. by role

What kind of impact would ordering the left sidenav by GitLab's 9 DevOps stages have on usability?

What assumptions do you have?

1. Our current navigation is what people are used to, but that doesn't mean it's efficient
2. There are cold/hotspots in our navigation that do not correlate directly with how easy they are to find initially. E.g. should boards be top-level item if it's used most?
3. A well run DevOps organization probably defines a lifecycle according to the 9 stages. source: #108 (comment 111609405).

Ultimately, what would you like to get out of the research?

I hope to get to a point where we have more clarity on how we should structure our navigation. It should be easy to find what you need from there.

• What should be top level?
• What should be flattened?
• What should be added/removed?

What's the latest date that the research will still be useful to you?

As long as GitLab exists.

Methodology

• Phase 1: Conduct usability benchmarking on the existing left side navigation via user's own GitLab instance. (#109) - (11.6)
• Phase 2, project-level: Card-sorting; Objective: understand how users categorize GitLab features. (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/ux-research/issues/126) - (11.7)
  • Open card-sort of the existing project-level left sidenav features (user create their own categories)
  • Hybrid card-sort for the project-level left sidenav features (users are asked to sort features into the 9 DevOps stages, but they can also create their own categories)
• Phase 3, project level: Tree-Testing; Objective: evaluate the findability of the proposed navigation structure. - (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/ux-research/issues/127) (11.8)
  • Test user performance on tasks with the project-level left sidenav ordered by 9 DevOps stages.

Progress

• Complete usability benchmarking of the left side navigation (#109) [Deadline: Tues Nov 20th]
• Analyze and report on findings from usability benchmarking [Deadline: Fri Nov 30th]
• Conduct wash-up meeting to discuss Phase 1 Research results and #108 (closed) proposal [Deadline: Weds Dec 12th]
• Determine next steps for followup research. [Deadline: Weds Dec 5th]
• Conduct followup research to understand the ways that users categorize GitLab features and assess their understanding of the 9 DevOps stages.
• Assess results from studies and determine whether ordering the left sidenav by DevOps stages is an improvement over existing left sidenav IA.