GitLab Navigation UX, 12 Oct 2021

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From YouTube: Navigation Update: 2021-10-12

Description

[Epic] Consistently allow for features to be disabled and removed from the left nav: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/3719

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Hey everyone, I'm tori davis, product design, manager for the foundations team and I'm back with another navigation update for you all. This week, I've been gathering information regarding how our project visibility settings affect the navigation items in the left sidebar.

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So when I say visibility settings, I'm referencing all of these toggles that live within settings general within a project. um So one common theme that we've heard from users is to allow the ability to disable features that may not be needed as a way to just focus. Attention and reduce overall clutter, so get lab is really used by many different personas.

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They all have different needs, and that can sometimes mean that projects are created for the purpose of being an issue tracker or maybe just a wiki, and we want to ensure that these visibility settings really allow users the flexibility to narrow their focus to match what the needs are for their particular project.

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So eric schroeder recently shared this epic with me and it lists all of the items that are currently within the left, nav bar of a project and it states whether we should be allowing it to be disabled and whether it can currently be disabled or not. um And within this epic. There are already a few linked issues such as this one here, which is to adapt the visibility settings that we used to have for operations into the new structure.

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That includes deployments infrastructure and monitor, and this is really great because it shows that teams are really thinking about how these settings should adapt to what we see within the navigation.

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So, in order for me to really get a good sense of what was happening with the visibility settings and also to update this table, that's a little outdated. It doesn't reflect all the changes that we've recently made to the left sidebar.

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I went ahead and did an audit of this again, which is what you see here in this spreadsheet and I'll. Add all this information from the spreadsheet into the epic moving forward.

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But this first column shows that all of the different visibility setting toggles that are available within a project- and there are three here that are highlighted in red, and I did that because these are the toggles that relate to features that don't map to a navigation item, and this really raised the question to explore further about whether distinct features should live here or or do they belong in another section somewhere else or not um in the second column, is all of the navigation items that appear within a project and then in this third column I list all of the visibility settings that will remove the nav item if toggled off.

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So, for example, if you toggle off repository, which you can see here, then all of the repository and the items that live underneath that get toggled off um under cicd. If you toggle off issues repository or ci cd, then test cases will be removed under cacd.

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So I did this for every visibility setting that we have to see how it maps to every item that lives in the left nav of the project and from doing this, I've already seen a few interesting findings and I'm going to go over a few of those right now.

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So first analytics stood out to me as an area that we're not being super consistent with currently um toggling off. Certain features don't correspond to the the items under analytics. So, for example, here I have merge, requests toggled off, but you're still able to navigate to the merge request, analytics page and there's um just some information saying that they're not available the same thing happens for issues when issues are toggled off. You see this empty state saying that there are no issues for the projects.

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Repository typically looks like this for a project that has a repository enabled, but for our pop for our project that does not have a repository enabled the analytics page will actually throw this 404 page and then insights is also an interesting one. Insights shows issues, dashboard and merge request dashboard, and these are both still here and available to navigate to. If you have issues and or merge requests turned off, there's also mixed results for our settings pages when the corresponding feature is disabled.

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So, for example, the if repository is turned off then normally there would be a ci cd setting here, but it's gone because repository is turned off. However, the repository setting here is still enabled, so you still have the ability to go through. All of these different settings pages is another interesting one.

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If you disable pages within visibility settings it still is available here under project settings and there's this alert that tells you that it's been disabled and that you can enable them within the general visibility settings.

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This is the only instance that I found so far that uses this pattern.

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Another interesting one is for com projects. They have this additional setting for cve id requests within the issue sidebar and what that looks like is, if you create a issue from a vulnerability, then the uh the issue sidebar will have this new section here. Where you can create this request and side note, I will create an issue to fix some of the the styling concerns here, but if you end up disabling issues within your settings, this setting is still enabled, even though you won't actually be able to access any issues.

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So we should probably change that to something similar to what we do for repository, where the features related to repository react depending on whether you're toggling off the parent feature or not.

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This also goes back to the original question of whether some of these more feature related things that don't have nav items should live in this section or not.

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So for me, next steps will be to really continue digesting. All of this information see what issues we've already created and then work with the teams who who were who work in these areas often and touch touch these areas.

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So I want to make sure to get their insight into what makes the most sense for toggling off the nav items, and this means that I'll be opening issues for some of those questions that I've raised in this video, um as well as some others, as I dive a little deeper into these settings and then I'll attach them to this main epic here and paying the relevant teams for input and prioritization.

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So that's it for today, if you have any insight into any of these uh different areas that I raised today. Please do comment in this epic so that we can make sure we have all the information needed to make informed decisions uh when moving forward and thanks everyone for watching until next time.