Improve UX polish

A recent comment from a podcast was:

“My final feeling about GitLab is that it's both an incredibly impressive work, like holy crap this is an incredible piece of software, high 5 team - but it feels like a little, not as polished as GitHub, just dumb stuff like margin, spacing."

Let's spend a little time thinking on how we can address this feedback.

UX designers (@dimitrieh @tauriedavis @cperessini @pedroms @hazelyang) - Please consider the above feedback, and brainstorm an idea or 2 on how we can continue to improve upon our polish. It can be a detail (some small typographic alignment fix, etc.), or a larger idea around consistency. It can be a sketch, rough comp, detail etc. We will hold a informal critique at our next team call (2/7), and make a plan of action to move forward.

Thanks! Let me know if you have any questions.

It would be great to make Gitlab UI as fastest as possible. It is not fastest nowadays. Especially on GitLab.com. It's not about polish, but conceptual.

@blackst0ne Do you have some specific examples of what you are thinking about? Thanks!

@awhildy

@blackst0ne Do you have some specific examples of what you are thinking about? Thanks!

Yes, sure.

Examples:

1. Open https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/labels. It takes too much time to open the page. Even if backend is slow, why not to load the page very fast and then to load the content asynchronously via ajax/websockets? It is much better than waiting for 29 seconds and seeing nothing's happening.
2. Open https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/analytics. You will see a 502 error after waiting for tens of seconds seeing loading indicator and nothing more. #22940 (closed)
3. #22921 (closed) Show current user immediately in filters
4. #14520 (closed) Add labels search. If I want to find a label on the labels page, I have to switch pages. It's very annoying especially when there are many labels and page loading is slow (example 1 above).
5. Open any MR with failed builds. Switch to the Build tab (e.g. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests/8922/builds). If I want to restart a single failed test, I click to the retry icon. But, hell, why does it redirect me to another page? It's not what I want and expect. Now, if I want to restart another test, what, I have to go back, scroll again, click to submenu again and click another retry icon just to get redirected again? Ok, I can use my mouse wheel to open page in a new tab, but in my opinion there's something wrong in this UX.

These example are the first that came to my mind. =)
There are many more.

ps: #22275 (closed) is stealing my time as well.

mentioned in issue #27614 (closed)

@awhildy already stated this somewhere else, but i created the label ~"UX Polish" ..perhaps rename it.. but i think it would be nice to have this.. also most of these issue would probably be nice issues for Accepting Merge Requests

yes we should get some scheduling on this too

Thanks for all the examples @blackst0ne! I totally agree with you on the importance of performance for the UX. There were a number of issues opened around performance recently and they have been scheduled for 9.0. This is the one for labels: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/27391. I'd like to see if we can improve the BE performance first as that would be the bigger win.

I'll track and push on those other issues. @blackst0ne - would you be able to create an issue for your 5th example above (about the MR with failed builds). Thanks!

Thanks @dimitrieh! Yep - let's try using ~"UX Polish" to track polish work. Name sounds good.

Do you mean scheduling on this issue? This issue is more a meta about brainstorming and creating the things we need to fix. I think scheduling the ideas that come out of it make more sense. Let me know if I'm missing something.

changed milestone to %Backlog

@awhildy

would you be able to create an issue for your 5th example above (about the MR with failed builds). Thanks!

Sure! Here it is: #27664 (closed)

Do you mean scheduling on this issue?

@awhildy i was thinking on that we actively schedule some of the ~"UX Polish" issues each release :). Perhaps some of those can be done by ourselves.. as we are already doing ^^

@awhildy, I have some thoughts on how to improve UX in issue new/edit pages.
How can I pay an attention of the UX team to them?

Tag us in issues @blackst0ne! We may not be able to address them immediately but we can add labels so they can be revisited and not get lost :)

added ~1434245 label

mentioned in issue #28614 (moved)

i am going to close this issue ;) We have the UI polish label.. let's schedule those going forwards

closed

mentioned in issue gitlab#8471