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by Sir_Substance 3260 days ago
>You can tell someone is copying someone else's work when they copy the bad stuff.

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.
2 comments
svesselov 3260 days ago
"The trick for gitlab will be in finding the UI differences that give the maximum improvement for the minimum change."

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.

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webmaven 3260 days ago
> 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

This used to be called the "do it like Amazon" rule, which was valid until about 2004-2005 or so.

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