GitLab Research Proposal

Opportunity

GitLab has transformed itself into a complete DevOps platform. Teams that use it to develop software need not look towards any other tool for planning, project management, creating, monitoring, etc. While GitLab’s core value is derived from the benefits it provides software development teams, the increasingly advanced project management features that it now offers its users make it a powerful project management tool as well. This research explores the opportunity of attracting a new user base towards GitLab, one that does not develop software. The research will shed some light on whether GitLab, in its current state, can easily be utilized as a standalone project management tool for teams who don’t necessarily develop software.

Goal

The goal of this research study is to understand how the project management experience of GitLab compares with Trello and Asana. In this study I will conduct a competitive usability assessment of GitLab’s main project management features with that of Trello and Asana. My objective is to:

• Quantify the difficulty/ease of performing certain project management actions on GitLab, Trello, and Asana.
• Identify what factors contribute to a good project management tool user experience.

Core Research Questions

1. Are new, non-developer users able to easily create an account on GitLab?
2. Are new, non-developer users able to easily create a project and manage the details of it on GitLab?
3. How does GitLab compare with Trello and Asana in its project management features as perceived by non-developer users?

Area of Focus

Several kinds of actions are required to manage a project. For the purpose of this study I have identified four main categories of features that every project management tool must have: administrative, team building, time management, and organization. I would like to target my focus for this research to the user experience of highly-performed actions that fall into these main categories. The table below summarizes the feature categories, purpose of the category, the actions that pertain to each category, and the task that the participant is to perform.

Click this link to view the table in detail.

Qualitative & Quantitative Approach

Qualitative observations of the pros and cons of each product’s user interface will be essential to understand which areas GitLab can improve upon as well as what they can learn from Trello and Asana.

Quantitative metrics I will gather in this study include:

• Whether the task is completed successfully or not within 3 minutes (In a real setting, users will not be spending more than a couple minutes to perform these actions. A good UX will have an intuitive interface and users will be able to perform the actions quickly.)
• Time taken to complete the task
• Users’ rating of how easy/difficult they found the task
• SUS score after all tasks are completed

Target Audience

I would like to recruit participants who are non-developers that have never used GitLab but have some experience using project management tools such as Asana, Trello, Jira, etc. Likewise, when testing with Asana & Trello, I will be testing with non-developers who are first-time users of that specific application.

Screening Questions

1. Determine participant is a non-developer.

Please select the option that you most closely identify with.

• I am a software/website developer. (reject)
• I have some software/website development and/or coding (educational/ professional) experience. (reject)
• I have no software/website development experience. (accept)
• Not sure. (reject)

2. Determine participant is a first-time user.

Please select any of the following software you may have used in the past.

• Trello (reject for Trello test)
• Asana (reject for Asana test)
• GitLab (reject for GitLab test)
• Parabol

Scenario

You lead a small team at a local marketing agency. Your boss wants you to utilize a project management software of your choice in order to track progress for your next project. You have looked at some possible tools and have decided to try [insert name: GitLab/Trello/Asana].

Tasks

1. Make a user account on this website. After 3 minutes, move on to the next task even if you were not able to not create an account. [Provide login information for the next task if the participant is not successful in creating an account.]
2. Using this website, create the project you will be tracking here. For example, it can be something like “ ABC Designs Marketing Campaign”. Feel free to use your imagination.
3. Break down this project into 3–4 tasks that need to be done in order to complete this project. Create these tasks utilizing this website. For example, one task could be to “Setup initial meeting with ABC Designs”.
4. Utilizing this website, group tasks that have a broader goal and are to be completed within a certain period of time.
5. Utilizing this website, categorize the tasks by theme such that you can see which tasks have a shared theme.
6. Utilizing the website, set a due date for one of the tasks.
7. Utilizing the website, indicate the estimated amount of time this task will take.
8. You had some time to work on one of these tasks for this project. Update that task to show how much time you have spent working on it and how much remains.
9. You would like to add one of your colleagues to this project. Their email address is: [provide an email address of an existing account on this website].
10. Assign one of the tasks that you created for this project to the colleague you have just added.

SUS Questionnaire

Please rate your level of agreement with the following statements. (1=Strongly disagree; 5=Strongly agree)

1. I think that I would like to use this website frequently.
2. I found the website unnecessarily complex.
3. I thought the website was easy to use.
4. I think that I would need the support of a technical person to be able to use this website.
5. I found the various functions in this website were well integrated.
6. I thought there was too much inconsistency in this website.
7. I would imagine that most people would learn to use this website very quickly.
8. I found the website very cumbersome to use.
9. I felt very confident using the website.
10. I needed to learn a lot of things before I could get going with this website.

Next Steps

Once GitLab approves the study, I will conduct this study and share the insights here.