Tufts University Solution Validation: CI/CD onboarding/templates experience
Overview
As part of https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-design/-/issues/2178+, the Tufts students spent their spring semester evaluating GitLab's CI/CD onboarding experience and creating deliverables based on the insights that they found during research. This issue contains a summary of their findings and links to the final deliverables they created.
What did we learn?
Usability testing round 1 (using current CI/CD onboarding experience) | Usability testing round 2 (using proposed CI/CD onboarding experience with a focus on finding and using templates) |
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Key pain points included difficulty finding important elements, confusion with importing and selecting a template, and confusion with the sidebar navigation. | The proposed way of finding the templates was successful and much quicker (participants completed the task in less than 10 seconds). The wording of the sorting feature was slightly confusing. |
Notes | Notes |
Proposal and next steps
Template selection | New navigation and enhanced pipeline visualization editing |
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Figma | Figma |
- Based on our current design process, the next steps would be to user test and reiterate upon our current designs.
- There is huge potential behind the “Visualize” feature, which could become a key feature for new users.
- Redesign the navigation sidebar to decrease nesting navigation menus.
Additional findings that were out-of-scope for this project
- Lack of Personalization/ Adaptation to the user’s experience.
- Uniform process regardless of CI/CD expertise.
- Very few suggestions for new users during onboarding.
- Ambiguous language in tutorial documentation (ie. "skip this step", when “this” is unclear).
- Issues and confusion with the ‘Scheduling’ tab under CI/CD pipelines.
- Confusion and interest with the ‘Validation’ tab under CI/CD pipelines.
- The interface has a wide scope which goes beyond CI/CD functions. The left side tab is especially confusing because of the abundance of options which cannot be reduced.
- The interface lacks certain error prevention features.
- Cannot quickly revert back to the last successful iteration.
- Cannot quickly view commit history to compare jobs.
- Does not give detailed information on why deploying doesn’t work properly.
Resources
Edited by Gina Doyle