Aside from that, it sounds like a well thought out feature, and it's good that they're redoing it instead of just changing it bit by bit.
Aside from that, it sounds like a well thought out feature, and it's good that they're redoing it instead of just changing it bit by bit.
Once people learn a UI, they really hate deviations from it. It doesn't matter whether githubs UI is good, and it doesn't matter whether gitlab's UI is better. People are used to github, and the peanut gallery will bitch if things are different. The trick for gitlab will be in finding the UI differences that give the maximum improvement for the minimum change. That's what will give the desired sensation of "clearly better than github". Overdo it, and it'll feel alien and weird.
This is the holy grail of UI for sure. We are striving for this in all of the decisions we make on the UX team. This change required a lot more change than we would have liked but we are implementing it in a way that we hope will bring maximum effectiveness and longevity.
This used to be called the "do it like Amazon" rule, which was valid until about 2004-2005 or so.
I actually love this feature on GitHub and wish it was a universally-accepted UX pattern so I could do it places like Amazon to remove the pre-selected category in their search bar. The convenience of the backspace outweighs the space the label takes in the search bar IMO, though GitHub could have made it smaller by shortening it to something like "this repo"