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Comment by sytse | Hacker News Reader

We want to increase both features and usability. It is easier to make something with few features easier to use but we think we can drive both at the same time. For usability we use the System Usability Scale https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/ux/performance... and increasing it is a target for this quarter "CEO KR: Achieve System Usability (SUS) target of 75. Issue 10314" https://about.gitlab.com/company/okrs/fy22-q1/

Regarding user interface modularity you can already turn on and off many parts in the front end https://imgur.com/a/aIRkDmt

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> but we think we can drive both at the same time

Eh.. I think the comments here are telling otherwise. I'll admit I haven't used Gitlab in over a year now. But I know the entire team I worked with really despised the switch to Gitlab internally. So much so we dragged our feet as the only team staying on Github while the rest of the company moved to Gitlab as long as we could.

It was a really unpleasant experience using Gitlab. The diffing in particular was truly awful by comparison. And in general everything was slower with Gitlab.

You should rethink this mindset of doing both at the same time and focus more on making what you have now better. It would likely benefit you greatly.

I’m curious what are some products that successfully do this? I honestly can’t think of any at the top of my head.

To me, more features and ease of usability can’t coexist. There must be compromises. I’ve heard the argument that it’s possible by hiding the advanced features, and I would agree in the short term. But internally, as teams grow and have to maintain multiple documentations noting depreciations, it creeps on the user’s end. It becomes harder to read documentation and there’s also the burden of trying to understand what it’s for because it was something that replaced a previous feature which I don’t have context for.

Please add features responsibly, and stop rewarding new features that seem helpful in a handful of use cases. But who am I kidding here

I'm inspired by products like Zoom, Chrome, VScode, and Slack that are both user friendly and full featured.

Any examples of features that we probably shouldn't have added and should consider removing?

We intent to replace the DIY DevOps toolchain with GitLab. Something that consists of many applications and interfaces. Just having it in a single application would already be a big quality of life improvement for the users. And so far the most common hurdle is being able to match the functionality of the point solutions.

I think your observation reflects a common pattern called the Flexiblity Usability trade-off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexibility%E2%80%93usability_...

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