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Redesigning GitLab's navigation

about.gitlab.com

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Re: Redesigning GitLab's navigation

#41

Post by StanAngeloff »

wolfgang42 wrote: post #29

My first thought on seeing this headline was "what, again?" Don't get me wrong, the new design looks great, but it feels like every six months they switch between having side navigation and putting everything on top. Every time they change there's a definite improvement, but you'd think they'd be able to come up with a design that works for at least a few years.

My thoughts exactly. We've used GitLab since version 6 [1] and things have always felt like they are in a state of flux ([2] [3] [4]). For an open source project this is tolerable. I do wonder what enterprise users make of this constant UI change? Now that the navigation is back on the left, we'll probably see it collapsible in 9.5 and then morphed into a horizontal bar by version 10, rinse and repeat.

[1]: https://about.gitlab.com/images/6_0/mr_on_fork.png [2]: https://about.gitlab.com/images/8_0/ci_dash.png [3]: https://about.gitlab.com/images/9_0/navigation.png [4]: https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/redesigning-gitla...

Re: Redesigning GitLab's navigation

#42

Post by _pmf_ »

wolfgang42 wrote: post #29

My first thought on seeing this headline was "what, again?" Don't get me wrong, the new design looks great, but it feels like every six months they switch between having side navigation and putting everything on top. Every time they change there's a definite improvement, but you'd think they'd be able to come up with a design that works for at least a few years.

Agreed; changing business software for change's sake is plain evil and will cost you customers. People still use the Bugzilla UI with 76 mandatory input fields and like it that way.

Re: Redesigning GitLab's navigation

#44

Post by tnolet »

_pmf_ wrote: post #42
wolfgang42 wrote: post #29

My first thought on seeing this headline was "what, again?" Don't get me wrong, the new design looks great, but it feels like every six months they switch between having side navigation and putting everything on top. Every time they change there's a definite improvement, but you'd think they'd be able to come up with a design that works for at least a few years.

Agreed; changing business software for change's sake is plain evil and will cost you customers. People still use the Bugzilla UI with 76 mandatory input fields and like it that way.

Salesforce is a great example. It is amazingly "old fashioned", tiny and uses non of the UX paradigms of the last 10 years. However, it gets work done really, really well. I'm disregarding the Lightning-UI versions for now.

Re: Redesigning GitLab's navigation

#45

Post by dorian-graph »

> We knew from previous feedback and from our research that including the global navigation links on the top navigation bar was superior to hiding them in a hidden hamburger menu.

Is this not at odds with https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/29835? Regardless, thank goodness they're changing it.

Re: Redesigning GitLab's navigation

#46

Post by bshimmin »

StanAngeloff wrote: post #41
wolfgang42 wrote: post #29

My first thought on seeing this headline was "what, again?" Don't get me wrong, the new design looks great, but it feels like every six months they switch between having side navigation and putting everything on top. Every time they change there's a definite improvement, but you'd think they'd be able to come up with a design that works for at least a few years.

My thoughts exactly. We've used GitLab since version 6 [1] and things have always felt like they are in a state of flux ([2] [3] [4]). For an open source project this is tolerable. I do wonder what enterprise users make of this constant UI change? Now that the navigation is back on the left, we'll probably see it collapsible in 9.5 and then morphed into a horizontal bar by version 10, rinse and repeat. [1]: https://a…

As someone who has never used GitLab, it is perhaps interesting to note that I would have literally no idea of the chronology of those images you've linked; if I had to guess, I would say the grey one (1) looks older than the purple one (4), but the other two look almost entirely unrelated.

Re: Redesigning GitLab's navigation

#47

Post by rkangel »

btown wrote: post #30

Is it really accepted best practice for UX testing to use a sample size of 12? That sounds remarkably low to draw product conclusions.

It's a slightly more formalised version of the 'corridor' UX test, where you grab the first person passing in the corridor and find out what isn't obvious to them about what you've just built.

Re: Redesigning GitLab's navigation

#49

Post by cyphar »

_pmf_ wrote: post #42
wolfgang42 wrote: post #29

My first thought on seeing this headline was "what, again?" Don't get me wrong, the new design looks great, but it feels like every six months they switch between having side navigation and putting everything on top. Every time they change there's a definite improvement, but you'd think they'd be able to come up with a design that works for at least a few years.

Agreed; changing business software for change's sake is plain evil and will cost you customers. People still use the Bugzilla UI with 76 mandatory input fields and like it that way.

I believe that you're expemplifying survivor bias. People use Bugzilla despite its horrible UI (and in fact, I know of several teams that have GreaseMonkey scripts that create an alternative UI on top of the base Bugzilla one). Bugzilla does a lot of things right, but its UI is not one of them.

GitLab had similar problems with its UI, and they've been improving it. Personally I welcome the improvements (though we use CE and not EE internally).

Re: Redesigning GitLab's navigation

#50

Post by cmatija »

mariocesar wrote: post #38

That is why I'm getting a 404 on all my repos? How hard is to deploy frontend changes without breaking the core backend?

Sorry to hear you're experiencing issues. Are you still affected? Are you logged in? If so, could you please open an issue in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support-forum/issues with as much info as possible?
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