UX research for License Management

What questions are you trying to answer?

In 11.2 we'll have License Management MVP. Is it useful? What is missing? Which are the next improvements?

• who is the primary persona using this feature?
• which is the net score of this feature?
• which are the most important missing features?
• which are the most important features that should be improved?
• is having blacklists/approvals at project level enough, or do we need per-branch?
• is group-level license management something users need?
• is blocking pipelines on conflicts something that should be enforced?
• is the license-centric approach better than the dependency-centric one?
• is the name the right one? (see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/6365)
• which software are people using for license management (if any?)

What assumptions do you have?

• License management is managed by project admins, consumed by developers
• it is more important in MR when adding new code rather than once it is merged

Ultimately, what would you like to get out of the research?

Figure out if we should iterate more after the MVP, and in which direction.

What's the latest date that the research will still be useful to you?

We are going to ship an MVP in 11.2, so the sooner the better since we don't want to stop iterating if the research will show that the MVP is not enough.

Progress

• Write survey questions
• Import survey questions into SurveyMonkey
• Test survey logic
• Write email to accompany survey
• Distribute survey to a test sample of users from the research panel
• Review answers and make any necessary amendments [Deadline: Tuesday 4th September]
• Distribute survey to the rest of the research panel [Deadline: Tuesday 4th September]

Sarah out of office from 11th Sept-23rd Sept. Will provide an update before vacation.

• Purchase Amazon vouchers, conduct prize draw and contact winners [Deadline: Monday 24th September]
• Cleanse data [Deadline: Monday 24th September]
• Analyse survey results [Deadline: Tuesday 25th September]
• Write up findings into a report [Deadline: Wednesday 26th September]
• Add the report to the UX Research Wiki [Deadline: Wednesday 26th September]
• Update relevant issues in the CE project [Deadline: Wednesday 26th September]

Report

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oUGBy56hVbPZrKTuIwqwCOwn7XU_NBr-/

Researcher recommendations

• Change the name of License Management to License Compliance.
• Allow licenses to be approved or blacklisted at a group level via settings.
• Add support for the following package/dependancy managers: Conan, Cargo and Composer.