Research around item groupings for the new sidebar navigation
What did we learn?
Results |
---|
2-3 sentences to summarize the results |
- Link to Dovetail project |
What’s this issue all about?
This research effort is to learn about and make any refinements to the item groupings for the new sidebar navigation. This includes things such as:
- Terminology used for the groupings
- Which items belong in which grouping
- Whether or not any additional groupings are needed
- Which items should be always exposed outside of a grouping (see designs)
- Interactions of the groupings
Our current proposed groupings are the following:
Group level | Project level |
---|---|
Plan | Plan |
Develop | |
CI / CD | |
Security & compliance | Security & compliance |
Operations | Operations |
Observability | Observability |
Analytics | Analytics |
What hypotheses and/or assumptions do you have?
We can leverage some of the current groupings and data, along with the designs already tested in our North Star design testing (#2083 (closed)).
Hypothesis - the groupings should match our most clicked left navigation items in some way or at least correlate to it.
What questions are you trying to answer?
Content
- Do the proposed grouping names resonate with users? Or do they need modified?
- Which groupings are most important to users? (this will probably vary by persona)
- Do any of the items within the proposed groupings need relocated?
- Are there any items that users do not correlate with any of the proposed groupings?
- Which items (if any) do users feel should always be exposed (outside of groupings)?
Interactions (additional details can be found here)
- If a user opens a grouping, should it maintain being open until they choose to close it?
- Should a grouping be automatically collapsed if another is opened?
Core questions
The questions above regarding content are primary concerns.
Additional questions
The interaction questions are more secondary, as we can always modify behavior later on and would be less problematic than changing navigation item locations or terminology.
What persona, persona segment, or customer type experiences the problem most acutely?
All users of Groups or Projects at GitLab
This research would benefit from the domain knowledge of different personas (for example, a Security professional would better understand what items best belong within a "Security" grouping). It would be ideal to at least include the following personas, similar to our previous research for the north star navigation (#2083 (closed)):
- Sasha (software developer)
- Parker (product manager)
- Sam (security analyst)
- Priyanka (platform engineer / operations)
What business decisions will be made based on this information?
We'll decide how to move forward with the new sidebar navigation items.