GitLab UX Team, 27 Apr 2021

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From YouTube: UX Showcase: Simplify Jira integration installation flow

Description

Issue: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/225803/

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Hello people vance here senior product designer for the ecosystem team and today, for for today's eric showcase, I want to talk about simplifying the jira integration installation flow.

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So for that we have an issue here, uh so there's currently three different ways to integrate: jira with git lab, so one being the git lab project. Integration two is the jira connect app for uh that lives in the atlassian marketplace and three is the dvcs connector, and this is mainly used for jira server and uh gitlab self-manage instances.

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So the issue with having these multiple ways to integrate, uh jarrod and gitlab is that it becomes confusing for the individual. That's setting these uh integrations up.

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There's different entry points into setting uh setting up these integrations and, uh and they don't, there isn't necessarily an easy way to understand all the different entry points and then what's the difference, for example, if, uh if you're setting up the project integration versus the connect app- uh and this also reflects- uh is reflected in the low ratings that we have for the connect app currently so, ideally, what would happen is if I was installing the jira project integration once I set that up, there would be a step there that I could say, also install the connect app and vice versa.

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If I'm installing the connect app first, there should be an easy way for me to click a button that would automatically set up the tier of project integration. That's tied to that same name, space.

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All right so with that I'll just talk a little bit more about each of the methods, so the first one being the gitlab project to your integration. So this integration has about a million projects using it and again it's geared more for developers using uh that primarily work in gitlab and that don't want to leave git lab. So it enables them to view their jira issues inside of gitlab, and they could also change the status of those jury issues from get lab.

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So, for example, they could reference a jira id and a merge request or commit and say, for example, closes lp1, and what that would do is uh change the status of that jira issue from gitlab.

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And I'll just give a demo what that looks like, so this is the project integration. This is maybe uh the integration that uh more people may be familiar with. So I have a project here that has this integration configured once that's configured.

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I could I'll see a new jira issues, nav item, and I could see my jira issues inside of gitlab, and I could also see the details of that issue now inside of kit lab and to do any other editing of this issue, I would have to go to jira directly to uh to change some of this content if I need it, okay. Secondly, now uh for the jira connect app, so this app has uh around tens of thousands of installs, uh which is a lot fewer than our uh our gitlab integration.

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So one of the desired outcomes is to increase the the number of installs for the connect app.

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So what this is, what the connect app is for is this is the reverse. This is more for pms and managers that primarily use gitlet or primarily stay in jira all day, but they want to get a sense of what's happening in gitlab, so this will having this installed will allow them to see the gitlab activity inside of inside of their jira issue.

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uh So just a quick demo. What that looks like, let's see so the connect app is in lives inside the marketplace, and this is the landing page for it and then once that's set up.

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If I go to my jira issue board here and I open up a jira issue, I'll have this new development panel that shows up and clicking on that I'll have a little bit more detail and all this activity that is coming from gitlab. So I could see my commits my merge requests and any other relevant build data here.

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Okay, so going back, and then we have this. The third method that I mentioned, which is the dbcs connector, and this is needed for integrating jira server and uh or um get lab self-managed instances. So for this uh showcase, I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna go into any detail about this third method.

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I'm just going to focus on the two, the first two okay, so so before I go into some some of the solutions for uh simplifying this install rate from both entry points from the jira, I'm sorry for the gitlab project, integration side and the connect app side, I'm just going to walk through what it looks like currently so right now, uh starting with the get lab, jira integration project integration right now, if I set that integration up and I hit save, I'm pretty much done so.

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If I was someone that's coming to this uh coming into this entry point, I might not even know about uh the connect app that it even exists or or what it's even for so ideally, in this case, there'd be some way to first of all know about the connect app and second of all, make it really easy to install from this screen.

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So here's a here's one proposal uh so proposal is once the integration saved. I would see as a toast message here that says: it's been saved and active, and at that point um uh you know the system knows already which namespace we're using and then we could uh make it more discoverable that the connect app exists so and ideally from there you could just hit one button to install you could install it.

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It would install the connect app and then we could provide uh ways to to go to manage that app so clicking the manage app would take them to uh their configuration screen uh in the connect app and that's where they could manage their namespaces or remove it if they needed to or they could read more documentation.

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uh So this seems pretty simple, but uh after working with uh luke our backend engineer from ecosystem, he did some technical feasibility uh research here and there are a lot of uh challenges that we face. Just uh with being able to do that, so one is: is that it's uh it's for jira cloud.

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Only and second- um and this is uh this- is one of the biggest challenges I I think is that um the jira cloud project must be set uh to uh have development mode enabled and uh right now it looks like there's like less than five percent of cloud customers have that uh setting enabled uh so uh that's a challenge, and then another challenge is that the project cannot have been previously installed or uh yeah. It previously couldn't have been installed in the marketplace.

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If so, uh then it could be forever blocked, uh which is a night which isn't a great uh experience there either.

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So um knowing these challenges constraints, so what a boring solution that we could do uh to start with is uh just bring that up here. Let's have a static mock-up, for that.

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What we could do is at least still make uh the connect app uh more discoverable by still using the banner, but instead of having a nice install flow that would just work in line. We could just uh link off to the connect app so clicking. This would take them to uh would take them to the marketplace to the to the landing page. They could still manually do the install, but at least this is a step in the right direction and requires a lot less engineering effort.

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All right, so that's it for that's one solution: proposal for the gitlab project integration so now moving on to uh the connect app so for the connect app, I'm just gonna I'll show everyone here what it looks like right now when you're setting it up for the first time. So when setting it up, uh I first have to log into gitlab, then I'll be prompted with this configuration screen where I have to add a namespace and link link could get lab namespace.

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So if I do that presented with a list of my uh available namespaces I'll, just link this test group up and once I've linked to uh namespace, I could see here uh what to do next, so I can see that it's been successfully linked and I can learn more about how that this integration works.

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So what we need to do here is somewhere in this flow. It would be great to uh prompt the individual installing this telling them that they could also easily configure the gitlab project integration for this for the same namespace.

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So I have a updated flow here so very similar to the existing flow. So I'd add a namespace click link and then we could add another step here. Once the namespaces have been selected, we could recommend to additionally configure the gitlab project integration for that same namespace and uh just a disclaimer here. uh This is still very early on uh in the design phase. So this hasn't. uh This still all needs to be uh looked at by a technical uh writer. So this is uh most likely.

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A lot of this copy will change, so once that's configured, uh this flow would be the same, maybe uh in a future iteration. We could also add another column to this table to show whether whether or not uh the get lab project integration that's associated with that namespace has also been configured, but for now uh this would be the first.

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Step so, let's see talked a little bit about the constraints, so that's it for uh this, for my ux showcase, um if you have any questions, feedback or comments, please leave them in this main issue that I've been referencing here and thank you all for.

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