The UI irks me enough that it alone would be a reason to move all my projects elsewhere

I still use Gitlab as a reporter and will continue to keep doing so, but as a developer I have moved away everything I can. While the catalyst for that was the (at least for me) catastrophic Cloudflare blocking, the alone UI irks me enough that it alone would be a reason to strongly consider moving all my projects elsewhere.

It might be just me, but I thought I’d share my feedback here in case somebody finds it useful:

1. The left sidebar seems disastrously chaotic to me. “Plan” and “Manage” seem completely arbitrary, tell me nothing about what’s in there, and make it a pain for me to even find the “Issues” and “Merge request” tab.

   As a developer I need to access those all the time, and if I not only need multiple extra clicks but I can’t even figure out where they’re hiding at a first glance, this is extremely frustrating. Even after using the new sidebar for a while, I still can’t remember where anything is in these two categories.

2. I hate that the UI shows way too many panes in general. Clicking an issue in an issue list brings up a floating pane now so I can see the issue and still the issue list for maximum confusing clutter, and if I double click the issue URL or whatever the pane just opens and closes and opening the issue page up standalone like it used to be is cumbersome. Double click should do that, or just get rid of that floating pane again altogether. Or make it optional and opt-in, like so much else of the at least in my opinion extreme clutter.

3. The UI has features enabled that 99% of open-source projects don’t use. Almost nobody of any of the small projects uses all the registries, the environments, the terraform stuff, the service desk when a simple issues list does the job, the snippets, file locks, iterations, requirements, test cases, and probably few are going to use the issue boards and milestones and special pipeline schedules. Yet all these things being enabled to every project by default is what makes the UI so overwhelmingly crowded. If all those things were gone, perhaps the “Plan”/“Manage” separation wouldn’t needed anymore either just to try to fit everything into one side bar.

4. When it comes to the issue form, I’ve never seen anybody use Weight, Date, Iteration, Subscription, Time Tracking, or Contacts either for any open-source projects, so why completely clutter the UI by showing them all without opt-in?

It generally feels like the UI is meant to impress enterprise customers, rather than start with a lean featureset that most people actually would use and let the enterprise users pick whatever they want to show up for their projects on top.

At the same time, it also seems to try cater to DevOps, Managers, Reporters, and Developers with the same selection, and I feel like as a result it’s the worst it could be for all three of those groups.

It might be just me however, in that case I apologize for sounding kind of negative. I hope my feedback was constructive enough that if others happen to see some of these issues as well, that something can be done about it.

Hi,

You can pin your favorites project-pages on the top of the sidebar.

The floating pane opens much faster than opening the issue full screen. I think that alone makes them really nice.

Also, the floating pane is some of the new design choice. I would say it’s a bit too early to judge whether they are good/bad.

This is a fair point.
However, I don’t always want to go through all the settings after creating a project to have the full range of gitlab functions.
Perhaps it would be useful to have profiles when creating the project, with which basic, advanced configuration like a kind of preset.

I think the majority gitlab users are on self-managed instances. In our instance, time tracking and date are commonly used.
Apart from that, these settings hardly take up any space and you can also close them. So I don’t understand the problem with having these features. Even if you see them as bloated.

IMO, the gitlab UI is good but slow. Navigating through gitlab isn’t really nice. If you compare it with gitea or github, gitlab is really slow. I often navigate via the URL to switch through projects instead of using the search or breadcrumbs because it’s too slow.

Apart from that, these settings hardly take up any space

Even when all of them are collapsed as much as possible, I don’t get how you mean that. Unless you consider half the screen estate of all the side bars “hardly any space”:

Screenshot_20250521_1329541767×1080 304 KB

Because it isn’t collapsed as much as possible

grafik1920×1042 209 KB

But I agree on a small screen it gets crowed fast. But I mostly work on a 24" screen with WQHD.

But then I can’t use the sidebar entries that I need, so in my view hiding the sidebar fully doesn’t seem relevant. We can disagree on this point, though.

Do you mean the sidebar entries on the left? Actually, the left-sidebar is easily accessed through mouse-hover on the left.

With the right-sidebar, you’re right. But most of the things on the right you can change via quick-actions.

While I agree that the right sidebar can be more painlessly ignored and toggled away, I think it fits into the larger difficult first impression that an active action is needed to not get swamped by seemingly irrelevant items for most projects. I just think it’s a little regrettable.