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Left Side Navigation Tree-Test: Proposed Project-Level Structure (Phase 1)

    • Closed Issue created by Katherine Okpara @katokpara

    What's this issue all about? (Background and context)

    After conducting a tree-test of the existing left sidebar structure we found that the overall average success rate was 52%. The most challenging tasks were related to Operations and Analytics. We also saw in the first-click test of Operations items that overall task success rates were around 30%.

    After analyzing the results of these studies, we decided to conduct an open card-sort of left sidebar to assess whether our categorizations are aligning with user expectations.

    As a result of those studies, we have proposed the following changes to the left sidebar structure:

    • Infrastructure as a top-level category that contains Kubernetes, Serverless, and Terraform
    • Deployments as a top-level category that contains Environments, Feature Flags, Releases, and A/B Tests
    • Renaming Operations to Monitoring
    • Renaming Issues to Project Management; Renaming List to Issues

    We also aim to explore the following changes:

    • Moving Members and Contributors to Project overview
    • Moving Requirements to Project Management
    • Adding a Merge Requests category to Settings
    • Renaming Settings>Operations to Settings>Monitoring
    • Moving Wiki to Project overview

    What are the overarching goals for the research?

    • Test the findability of the proposed IA structure for the project-level left sidebar. Compare findings with task performance on existing structure.
    • Explore some of the categorization patterns observed in the card-sort of left sidebar items.

    What hypotheses and/or assumptions do you have?

    • The proposed structure will lead to improvements on task success rate and time on task
    • Renaming Issues to Project Management won't cause a significant change in performance

    What research questions are you trying to answer?

    • How do users expect to navigate GitLab?
    • Which content is easy to find?
    • Which content is difficult to find?

    What persona, persona segment, or customer type experiences the problem most acutely?

    GitLab users who have been using GitLab actively for at least 90 days and use at least 2 stages.

    What business decisions will be made based on this information?

    We will make improvements to the left sidebar IA based on the research results.

    What, if any, relevant prior research already exists?

    Relevant links (opportunity canvas, discussion guide, notes, etc.)

    Progress

    • UX Researcher: Enter tree-test tasks and navigation into TreeJack.
    • UX Researcher: Pull a mailing list from the data warehouse.
    • UX Researcher: Pay participants.
      • Contacted 3 winners
    • UX Researcher: Synthesize the data and identify trends, resulting in insights. Document in Dovetail.
    • UX Researcher: Update the Problem validation research issue. Link to findings. Unmark as confidential if applicable. Close issue.
    ✓ 6 of 6 checklist items completed · Edited by Katherine Okpara

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