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[Meta] Possible changes Site/Application wide (onboarding practice)

    • Closed Issue created by Dimitrie Hoekstra @dimitrieh

    This issue collects all changes I would like us to give a first or second look upon. Some of these changes I discussed with my interviewers before I was onboarded. I will group them in categories.

    Typography:

    I think this is an important issue to implement, that would improve the overal Gitlab quality by a lot. All places where text should be human readable and is not code, should be controlled in such a way that line length is not getting longer than 120-130 chars.

    • Inclusive Design Test suite and guidelines

    This is a topic where I would love to investigate into. Inclusive design is the practice of making your designs adapt to as many language scripts and people with disabilities as possible, by keeping them in mind in certain design decisions. As GitLab keeps expanding and expanding, more and more people around the world want to use it/need to use it. Let's take into account the people that do not use latin or cyrillic script or have a hard time seeying tiny letters and create a test suite for checking if everything still works in those circumstances.

    There was an awesome talk about this at the apple developer conference called Inclusive App Design

    Context:

    Chips could be introduced to give additional information on for example:

      • which user is mentioned
      • to which repository the mentioned issue of merge request belongs to
      • verify that the issue exists (isn't misspelled)
      • immediately see if issue is closed
      • immediately see if merge request is merged
      • see if MR CI has finished and if it was successful

    google material design guide reference

    Markdown:

    image at the moment you can get it done with html

    <ul>
<ul>
<li>item</li>
</ul>
</ul>

    Hierarchy in your issue description is quite important. The possibility of having a different bulleting icon possible for a standalone list, can improve this.

    Repository settings:

    Editor:

    • Possibility to style text with common short cuts like command / ctrl - D instead of using the wysiwyg buttons in the upper right corner of the editor. (like in the ghost.org editor)
    • What about additional html preprocessors like Haml/Slim/Jade support?
    • When including images within a piece of text (issue/MR/comment) it would be great to be able to preselect different width's or heights to style it to. At the moment a picture can sometimes make the total content of a piece of text be almost unreadable or seem incoherent. (At the moment I fix this with custom writing an <img> tag with a widthattribute present)
    • Direct or mirrored editable markdown rendering editor: Quite often I switch between preview and raw (but editable) views of the text editor within gitlab. It would improve the UX to immediately see your rendered markdown result (like in the ghost.org editor or medium)
    • "Draft saved" feature connected with your account like google's Inbox/gmail. At the moment this is I think (and correct me if i am wrong) saved within local storage. But I would love to be certain all my edits are saved when working on the description of a really big issue like this one, plus being able to take over/continue on another device.
    • Full screen editor has the scroll bar at a weird position (meaning not at the far right edge of the screen)

    Style:

    quick example: image

    image

    I think it would be better to expand in a way to unifies the original shortened title with the extended part, see:

    image

    Navigation:

    Still I think the sidebar is at a place now where it doesn't do itself or GitLab justice. I have a lot of things to say for it, but also against it. In the end I think the current state is not good enough to justify its existence. It feels like a relic, or should be updated.

    It includes profile specific + site wide navigation. However the profile has since been removed from it and has been placed in the upper right corner of the interface.

    Let's break it down per navigation element:

      • Projects

    One of the few elements that could belong here and the one I personally use the most.

      • Todo's

    Same as notifications, has already a superior alternative in upper right corner

      • Activity

    Activity over all "your" or "starred" projects. Although this is pretty oke to monitor projects it currently has insufficient filters and thus I wonder how much this is used. I talk about this elsewhere in this issue.

      • Groups

    Could be displayed under profile settings in profile dropdown.

      • Milestones

    Same as "Activity"

      • Issues

    Instead of notifications it displays Site Wide "assigned" issues. This can easily be placed for example next to notifications

      • Merge requests

    It displays Site Wide "assigned" MR's. This has a place next to the previous item.

      • Snippets

    One of the few elements that could belong here.

      • Help

    Could be displayed under profile settings in profile dropdown.

      • Profile Settings

    Already available somewhere else (more logical place to booth)

    It used to be a place where you could find/navigate to anything. Right now it's an inconsistent place to find "some" things. If it has too many elements, it becomes bloated and ineffective, but at the same time if there are not enough items in it, it is a highly inefficient usage of screen real estate (as it takes up a vertical screen portion). I calculated it wasting at least 7% of total screen real estate based on the following screencap portions:

    screenrealestate

    Possible solutions:

      • Do away with it, get all navigation to somewhere else (omg no sidebar? :biohazard: )
      • Extend current navigation, so you don't need to load another page to get to the project you want for example. (that's where I use it the most for at the moment, "get to project X or Y")
      • Make it custom configurable for power users, to get the navigation in there, that they want
      • Display all your projects and snippets, with a quick inline search functionality

    Of course if we would change this, it would again be a pretty big overhaul as things considered sidebar. How do we bring this change to the community etc in a good way? In my opinion change is necessary.

    Inconsistencies:

    image

    image

    image

    image

    image

    Snippets:

    Performance:

    • Speed

    I know that gitlab is used a lot on premise, and that on itself this is a huge factor in speed performance, however when looking at gitlab.com, I think this could be improved upon in order to make it more delightful to use.

    Community Support:

    GitLab has a IRC channel and while it is approachable, Gitter has gained attention for its ease of use. When I was trying to get some questions answered via these (direct..) channels, I could see a lot of improvement if the chat was mirrored to each other (so they would support each other). This could easily be done by a bot.

    If this would be done, it could even be extended to our slack, with a dedicated channel that on its turn mirrors both the irc and the Gitter channel (as they are now connected), to create a connection with GitLab's Personel.

    • Get more open to Designers

    Git is all about programming, but sometimes features for a service such as GitLab need to be designed as well. Let's make it easier for designers to pitch in.

      • https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/755 [ ] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/2842 Addition of an onboarding page for ux designers
      • https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-design/issues/14 We need to improve upon the GitLab Designer Kit (which is the design repo), by adding detailed instructions there. (including unified spec formats and tools, discussed in the same issue: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/755 ) - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-design/issues/14
      • https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/18579 We need to finish the Design Guidelines
      • What about an MVP of Design?
      • https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/772 What about a stable Dribbble presence for GitLab to attract even more likeminded designers? release every 22nd a few updates on it
      • https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/21272 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/21273 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-design/issues/15 We need to support more design formats for diffs & preview, like: .sketch, .psd etc. Please see Sketch CLI tool
      • https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/2641 It would be awesome to be able to discuss details within images inside an issue discussion, like dropbox:
    image

    about.gitlab.com:

    handbook:

    • https://dev.gitlab.org/gitlab/organization/issues/956 Throughout the handbook there are documents managed with google docs, such as the example contracts. I was wondering if people would see value in getting these into the same versioning workflow as the rest of the handbook (git). This as, we could generate these contracts with LaTeX and let them be auto generated with HAML & CI through Pandoc. See my following project

    These are a lot of changes, probably for some are already existing issues. Others I would like to discuss and/or create issues for.

    22 of 31 checklist items completed

    Designs

      Child items ...

      2. Activity

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