[Design] Exploring merge widget placement above merge request tabs
Exploration issue
This is an exploratory issue and is not something the group is committed to build
Overview
This issue explores an alternative approach to the merge widget positioning at the top of the Overview tab discussed in #570673. This concept investigates placing the merge widget above the tabs of the merge request page.
Original comment https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/570673#note_2895008229
What do you think about a smaller merge widget variant that goes right after the title? It can help people that are struggling with navigating the merge widget but it won't sacrifice the content hierarchy.
Design concepts
Challenges
- Takes up a lot of vertical space without a collapsed view
- Scalability of information that we can present
Benefits
Potentially removes the need to surface additional widgets on the Overview tab thus improving page load performance by loading only necessary information to the merge widget and loading extra details only when requested.
Connects merge widget with running a pipeline
It is common that developers would want to keep the merge widget close to the pipeline widget today so that they can restart specific jobs to get a passing pipeline. This might be even more relevant with configuring inputs when running a pipeline from the merge request page:
Dive into critical findings
This would also be useful in the context of Reports where we could highlight critical findings with an easy way to get to the details in the Reports tab. This would mean that at glance users can jump into investigation rather than trying to find the specific report widget somewhere in the middle of the page.