Better understand how users prioritize and digest metadata on issues, merge requests, boards, and epics
What’s this issue all about?
Better understanding how users digest the metadata type information on lists and cards in issues, merge requests, boards, and issues. If we could better understand why each point of information is important to them while looking at these artifacts and the priority of each- we could better structure the IA of these cards and lists, and perhaps even remove some superfluous information- allowing users to better focus and find what they need.
What hypotheses and/or assumptions do you have?
Users may not need to see all the metadata at all times. We may be able to determine some defaults here and allow users to customize views in order to add more. For MVC, we could at least give more hierarchy to data users find most valuable.
What questions are you trying to answer?
Issue list | Issue widget | Epic list | Epic tree | MR list | MR widget | Boards |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Core questions
- How do users rank all this metadata in order of importance to them?
- Why is each item important to users?
- When is each item important (in the journey, what job is it fulfilling)?
- Which items would users expect to see at all times at top hierarchy vs being on investigation (toggling them on, hovering, etc)?
- Is the current way this information displayed what users expect? How would they prefer to consume this?
- Is there anything else users would expect to see here?
- What are they doing with the information here? Are they storing or sharing it? Compiling it?
- We currently truncate some information but not others. What information do users find acceptable to truncate?
Additional questions
- The identifier has been a bit of a mystery to me. What are users doing with this? Are they copying it? How much of it do they need to see? Does it need to be at top-level?
- Is the new health status as users would expect? Are they able to use it? What would boost usage?
- As we add health indicators to things like boards and lists- do users need to see all three statuses at all times? Do they expect to see them? Is there one status they care about seeing more than others? Would they ever want to hide status in some circumstances?
What persona, persona segment, or customer type experiences the problem most acutely?
Phase | Topics | Persona 1 | Persona 2 | PD/UX |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Epic list, Epics, Roadmap | Parker | Delaney | @uhlexsis |
2 | Issue list, Issues, Boards | Parker | Delaney | @hollyreynolds @uhlexsis |
3 | MR list, MRs, Milestones, list Milestones | Delaney | Sasha | @pedroms @uhlexsis |
What business decisions will be made based on this information?
Reorganization of information on the cards and lists.
What timescales do you have in mind for the research?
Ideally quite soon as we are discussing adding more information to lists, cards, and trees- and are getting feedback that these items are "cluttered".