Closed
Description
Proposal: Introduce a branded, collapsible navigation bar to in-browser editing experiences within Gitpod (Figure 1)
Why?
- Fewer clicks to editing experience - Currently when selecting a desktop IDE, the user is met with a splash page (Figure 2) where they could alternatively be brought direct into the editing experience.
- Application and navigation context - We have observed that onboarding users entering Gitpod are sometimes not aware that there is a whole dashboard experience which exists within Gitpod when they are put into a workspace. Having a navigation bar within the browser would allow us to give a "back" button and breadcrumb type experience.
- Dashboard experiences closer to editing experience - Currently within Gitpod there is a disjoint between the behaviours that are accessible in the dashboard and also within a workspace. Having a shared navigation would mean that some functionalities that are exposed into the dashboard could be moved closer to the in-editing experience.
- Branding - As Gitpod wraps a lot of existing tools, such as VS Code, Docker etc. Adding this navigation bar would give us an opportunity to add additional Gitpod branding into the in-workspace experience, and implement Gitpod specific features such as feedback polls [1].
Objections
- Why not use the command palette? The command palette experience is not a familiar UX for non VS Code users, so some users don't know that it exists, or the keyboard shortcuts to open it. The command palette cannot easily be branded to be obvious Gitpod, with the exception of the current prefixing
gitpod:
, etc. - Will this not damage the "immersive" nature of the editing experience? The navigation bar should be considered collapsible, to return full screen real estate to the user.
Figure 1 | Figure 2 |
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