GitLab UX Team, 26 Mar 2021

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From YouTube: Compliance: UX Office Hours (2021-03-26)

Description

0:15 Differentiate MR Approval Settings from Approval Rules
0:37 Accessibility best practices in Pajamas
1:10 Add usability improvements to the Release Post, example
2:02 Small frontend tweak to linking Jira Issue
2:49 Mass migration of HAML buttons, !56968
3:33 Sam and I have been refining the compliance report &5237
4:12 Continuing to collaborate with Daniel Mora on cascading settings
5:18 Incoming blog post on why GitLab designers contribute to our codebase, review app
5:41 "Could you help me understand the updated strategy for Compliance Framework Labels?"

A

Hey everyone: my name is austin. I'm a product designer here at gitlab this week, I'm going to jump into the agenda. I have a feeling it might be a little bit longer than usual, so I'm going to probably break down this video into chapters so check in the description or scrub, as you feel needed. First thing I wanted to do is just thank the team for helping me get this change merged in.

A

There was some really great collaboration across several different people that helped me really get this through, and I was excited to see this outcome come through so that we can finally differentiate the section for approval rules versus approval settings. So that's awesome.

A

The next thing I wanted to share was: I helped get a merge change into the pajamas handbook. Essentially, so we're articulating a few ways that when you're reviewing a merge request, you can consider the accessibility of the features that you're working on. So these are things like looking at focus states the keyboard interactions, some of the ways that you would have a screen. Reader read back certain attributes like svgs or different text components.

A

So, if you're looking for some guidance, there check it out next, I want to touch on this idea of highlighting usability improvements in the release post. So alexis was sharing with us how they're going to be incorporating this in the future and what it looks like is just a list of the different issues or urge requests that highlight small usability improvements.

A

This is a pretty great idea because it helps capture some of the idea, some of the changes that don't necessarily get as much of the glory of the release post but nonetheless, are super valuable. So these are some of those ui polish issues that we go through just to help make the user experience a little bit more refined each and every release so I'll be looking for ways to include that for our team in the future.

A

All right. Next, I wanted to share a little bit about a little collaboration. I've had with pedro. He has been working through this massive epic to improve the ui copy of the merge request, widget and as we look to uh improve upon that and add on to it, I wanted to make sure that his feedback was incorporated.

A

So you can kind of see a few examples of how they're replacing some of the text. So what that would mean for us is just potentially changing the text here. Changing the button label, that's about it, nothing significant, but I'll. Let you know when I finalize that and have updated the issues.

A

This week we did a mass migration with some of the older hambul components, so, specifically the buttons they're still in bootstrap, I went through found a couple ones. I didn't find anything specific in the compliance group, but I did find just some random ones that I thought could be better improved before this migration went in. So if you notice, there's still some green buttons out, there feel free to open an issue, tie it back to this, mr uh and be on lookout.

A

If you see any weird ui bugs with some of those buttons that may have been updated here, I think there were like over 100 buttons, so we probably didn't catch everything, but hopefully we got most of it all right and this week sam, I did a little bit of cross-collaboration on breaking down this big epic, so we have a handful of issues that were getting ready for planning breakdown, and so hopefully these are in good vertical slices that we can actually break down to implementation issues. I'm very excited about this feature.

A

I think this will be a head turner for sure heard really great feedback and solution, validation with numerous candidates or numerous participants in the research studies. So I think this can be a really meaningful change when we get around to it.

A

I've also been working a lot with daniel and a few other designers on talking about cascading settings.

A

If you have time it would be awesome if you wouldn't maybe just watch this video that I shared and kind of dug through some of the diagrams that I was highlighting in terms of how we could make this model work more effectively. What's pretty funny about this specific area, is you have essentially three different ways? Inheritance works, so you can look at prevent, sharing, disable email notifications and enable project removal. They all behave differently in terms of inheritance and enforcement, and who can do what.

A

So there are plenty of examples of how this lives in settings. This is probably the only place where you're going to find like several different methods, all in the same area that can be very confusing for users, so I'm hoping that my merge request to standardize. This will help create a repeatable pattern, but I think we're still a long way from finding a consensus of what that pattern should ultimately be.

A

This week I also wrapped up a blog post, so it's not published yet, but the mr has been merged. So if you want to go, get a little sneak peek of that, you can go check out the review app and read why I feel that gitlab designers contribute to the code base. It speaks mostly to my own personal experience, working here at gitlab and learning how to do that.

A

Lastly, okay, this one felt like a great question for office hours um dan was asking if I could share a little bit more around like the strategy for the compliance framework labels.

A

Perhaps this warrants a visionary issue or an epic, but for now we'll suffice with a little more of a explanation in short form, so I mentioned that we moved away from the regulated, toggle or segmented controller we were considering putting in for compliance frameworks.

A

This was because I was working on the assumption that the effective model for settings enforcement inheritance could tie to our compliance frameworks. What other pms and designers have shared with me is that that can create its own complexity in terms of issues, and it probably isn't solving the problem effectively.

A

So, in light of those comments, feedback commentary- whatever you want to call it- we've opted to move away from this. We can evaluate it as we move forward, but for now what we've seen customers use these frameworks for is mostly as just a fancy badge for saying this project has something to do with gdpr.

A

I've asked a few people about it and that's kind of all they're using it for right now I haven't heard explicitly feedback on. I wish it would do x.

A

However, what I was told when I joined the vision for these compliance frameworks is that they would be able to be applied to projects and then create sensible defaults. I think we're still a long way from that, but I think there are some cool ideas that we can continue to iterate on and discover how they're more useful. So we have one coming out soon: around the compliance pipeline configuration location mouthful, as always, this might not be the best home for in the long term.

A

Actually I was talking with sam white and annabelle from a different group and they were showing me how they envisioned, potentially us integrating these changes into this policy builder. So what could be really cool is if we were able to tie into the way they construct policies by using our compliance framework labels as a criteria in the rule set and then being able to refer back to that compliance yaml file without having to make the user go and create everything.

A

The experience for getting this single field up and running is not the best, so I'm looking to actually highlight the whole customer journey or the user journey in this flow and look for opportunities about improvement.

A

The way that policy builders are going to work is it's going to do a lot more of the manual effort that you need to do for like spinning up a project and putting a file somewhere so we'll see how that kind of plays out but know that we're trying to figure out what the best use of these are based off of feedback.

A

We hear from customers, but also from ideas we hear from other stages and groups about ways we can work together with that said, I mean, there's still a feature, I'm still researching in solution validation, trying to see if we can give this extra authority to force merge to group owners we'll have to see if that will continue to test well with users. I still haven't gotten any great customer feedback really haven't gotten any customer feedback on my most recent proposal on it.

A

So we'll see how that goes, I think we're still kind of waiting to find out, but for now I think what they're going to understand, as are objects, to help categorize and highlight specific projects, because we know that's been useful for customers so far and we will look to find ways to make the compliance frameworks more useful in the future. That could mean building this out further or integrating into other areas of the product, I'm not particularly tied to solution, but as we discover more problems, I can see this helping us solve this.

A

I hope that answers your question dan. If it doesn't, let me know- and we can further sync up on it all right. It was a longer one thanks for hanging in there with me I'll catch you next week.