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Thanks for visiting the GitLab Navigation & Settings category direction page. Much of this page is inspired by the work our UX department has done over the years leading the way in research and design for the navigation and configuration experience within GitLab. As a global, foundational aspect of the GitLab product, this area does not have an obvious, single product owner.
This strategy is a work in progress, and everyone can contribute:
We are responsible for creating navigational structures that are intuitive, in tune with user needs, and representative of the numerous workflows of our community of users. However, when designing for the needs of so many different people, we often have to make compromises and not everyone is pleased with the result. Navigation is not just about getting from point A to B; it can shape workflows, empower users to discover new, more efficient ways of working, and ultimately determine how comfortable users are with a product. From the moment users log in for the first time to when they start diving deeper into GitLab’s diverse feature set, our navigation structure is critical for shaping the user's path and, ultimately, their success in using GitLab.
Similarly, GitLab can be customized and configured to meet the specific needs of a wide variety of use cases. The flexibility offered within each feature is exposed in the Settings pages and the overall experience of GitLab is greatly impacted by the user's ability to discover, manipulate, and return to these settings with confidence and consistency.
We want to provide a better experience for users to complete common navigational tasks. These include:
Navigation is currently project and group centric. It’s easy enough to find “Project Things” and “Group Things” such as a project issue list, but it’s harder for an individual to find “My Things”, such as an aggregate of their MR pipelines. We don’t provide users with tools to quickly get to items that are important to them. This is where we are headed.
projects and groups.Projects
Groups
user centric navigation that feels more like this.Users
With regard to the Settings experience, we are looking to improve discoverability and consistency within the pages. Our efforts are focused on:
In short, all roles & personas interact with navigation. We are focusing on helping users orient themselves around the things that are most important to them, so they can be more productive.
We have not planned to launch a whole new navigation experience. The work we have in the backlog to enhance the navigation is rather high in volume and many of the issues are heavy in weight. At this time we are focusing on issues that we can ship quickly that will have a high impact on how users interact with Gitlab.
As this is not a marketing category, we don't have a specific measure of maturity. However, our opinion is that this category is currently at the "Viable" maturity level. Our next maturity target is "Complete" by the the end of Q4 2021 (see our definitions of maturity levels).
Recently, we conducted system usability research to better understand how our users interact with GitLab and also benchmark our results. In the feedback from the open text of the survey, we found a few key themes that tie back to our navigation. Below is a list of videos explaining our findings.
