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The issue is not that Gitlab is missing any of the pieces. The issue, I believe, is the organization of such pieces so that you can find them intuitively. This
by eslaught 10y ago
The issue is not that Gitlab is missing any of the pieces. The issue, I believe, is the organization of such pieces so that you can find them intuitively.
This is admittedly a lot better in Gitlab today that it used to be. When I started, I literally could not figure out basic things like how to get to a specific repository inside of an organization. It also doesn't help that Gitlab has chosen to use its own jargon for each of the basic concepts. A "project" is a "repository" and a "group" is an "organization", etc. I can kind of grok it, but I sometimes do a double take when something isn't where I expect.
For example: In my mental model, "project" == "repository". But when I go to a project home page like say [1], I don't see a code browser or commit list, or options that obviously take me to either of those. Instead, I have to click the "Repository" tab first. (It turns out that tabs can have second-level tabs, which means those options are hidden initially and thus not discoverable.) But I thought a "project" was a "repository"?
I fully realize the Gitlab notion of "project" may be more general than just a "repository", but this is an example of the sort of cognitive dissonance that I get navigating around the site.
At this point I've mostly made peace with the Gitlab interface, so it's a bit hard for me to pull up examples like this now. And as I said above, the interface has improved. But when I first started using Gitlab, there were a lot of things like this (little points of cognitive dissonance) which made it seriously an uphill battle to even use the product.
[1]: https://gitlab.com/StanfordLegion/legion https://gitlab.com/StanfordLegion/legion
- sytse 10y agoThanks for the response, and I'm glad that it is better than it used to be. In GitLab people can have a project without a repository, for example with just a wiki or an issue tracker. For that reason we use different words for it. Single people also use GitLab as a single tenant we prefer to use the word group over organization. That will also fit better when we introduce nested groups in GitLab 9.0 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/2772 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/2772 Good point about showing files by default, we're discussing that in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/26834 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/26834 Thanks for using GitLab!
- pestaa 10y agoThanks for the open discussion! As eslaught pointed out, it's not about the obvious mistakes. Unfortunately, the navigation is very fragmented. There's a left menu, which should be the primary one, but it changes all the time depending on the context. The top menu is very inconsistent, presented in multiple layers, with different styles for each level, using very low contrast text with no other visual aid. There are no dropdowns or other ways to get to frequented pages faster. Being aligned to center also prevents me from memorizing the UI spatially (YMMV). And there's also the issue with minimalistic buttons acting like links. It is my humble opinion that rewriting the frontend in Vue will not, by itself, alleviate the matter; however, fixing this part of the UX will make GitHub and Atlassian really run for their money.
- sytse 10y agoThanks for the advise, I passed it on to our UX team. I agree that rewriting in Vue is just an element of having a good interface and that the menu itself is very important too.
- dimitrie 10y agoThanks for your feedback! This will an is becoming more and more a focus for us! To join the discussion see: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/26348#note_23730202 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/26348#note_23... or https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/18844#note_23731395 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/18844#note_23...