Synthesize prior research on MR navigation and user flow
Research findings
Recommendations
- Research the user journey of MR authors and reviewers to inform the other recommendations
- Reorganize MR metadata to emphasize what users value and use the most
- Move the MR widgets to a consistent location, to increase their findability and usage
- Redesign comments and activity to highlight relevant items and ease chronological reading Research the currently fixed merge request UI elements to remove this behavior whenever possible
What's this issue all about? (Background and context)
See epic: &5038 (closed)
As a first step, we want to synthesize the prior research on MR navigation and user flow to understand if we have enough to answer the research questions. If not, we should then be able to identify the “known unknowns”, the questions that we still need to answer, and how we should answer them.
What hypotheses and/or assumptions do you have?
- The MR UI is overwhelming — hard to parse and feels crowded.
- The MR UI lacks focus — information and actions are scattered and it's unclear what user's should look at.
- IA doesn't support user's goals.
- User's goals vary depending on role and moment in the review cycle.
- For example, the author's mental model mainly revolves around reviewer's comments. The reviewer's mental model mainly revolves around the changes (commits and files) in the first review pass, but then changes to mainly revolve around comments in subsequent review passes.
What research questions are you trying to answer?
For all of these questions, do we have enough inputs today to answer them with a high degree of confidence?
- What are the problems of the MRs UI structure? How are they ranked?
- What does the user's journey with MRs look like? What are their goals? What do they value? Does that change over time?
What persona, persona segment, or customer type experiences the problem most acutely?
Sasha, Software Developer
What, if any, relevant prior research already exists?
- Code Review UX synthesis
- Exploring Code Review Workflows
- External code review process problems
- Code Review - User Interviews - April 2019
- Feedback on moving merge request navigation tabs to the top
- Merge Request Page - Results
- Customer feedback
- Insights from Code Review customers
- Metadata priority for MRs: slides and video
- Merge Request Widgets - Workflow Interviews
- Interviews with Software Engineers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
- Code review workflow for VS Code users
- Opportunity canvas for code reviews in VS Code
- In progress: Solution validation: MR diff findings
- In progress: Foundational research for Secure: focusing on developer engagement
What timescales do you have in mind for the research?
Who will be leading the research?
Relevant links
Related issues and epics (and their issues):
- Consolidate merge request main actions in one place
- Improve experience of multiple reviewers at the same time in the same Merge Request
- Product discovery for merge request diff navigation
👀 Track unread diffs/files in Merge Requests⏰ Chronological merge request discussions🌻 Increase focus of merge request changes tab- Improve navigation and comparison of commits in the merge request