Synthesize prior research on MR navigation and user flow

Research findings

Recommendations

Research the user journey of MR authors and reviewers to inform the other recommendations
Reorganize MR metadata to emphasize what users value and use the most
Move the MR widgets to a consistent location, to increase their findability and usage
Redesign comments and activity to highlight relevant items and ease chronological reading Research the currently fixed merge request UI elements to remove this behavior whenever possible

What's this issue all about? (Background and context)

As a first step, we want to synthesize the prior research on MR navigation and user flow to understand if we have enough to answer the research questions. If not, we should then be able to identify the “known unknowns”, the questions that we still need to answer, and how we should answer them.

What hypotheses and/or assumptions do you have?

The MR UI is overwhelming — hard to parse and feels crowded.
The MR UI lacks focus — information and actions are scattered and it's unclear what user's should look at.
IA doesn't support user's goals.
User's goals vary depending on role and moment in the review cycle.
- For example, the author's mental model mainly revolves around reviewer's comments. The reviewer's mental model mainly revolves around the changes (commits and files) in the first review pass, but then changes to mainly revolve around comments in subsequent review passes.

What research questions are you trying to answer?

For all of these questions, do we have enough inputs today to answer them with a high degree of confidence?

What are the problems of the MRs UI structure? How are they ranked?
What does the user's journey with MRs look like? What are their goals? What do they value? Does that change over time?

What persona, persona segment, or customer type experiences the problem most acutely?

Sasha, Software Developer

Relevant links

Related issues and epics (and their issues):

Edited Nov 22, 2021 by Pedro Moreira da Silva