Increase clarity that an upgrade is available for the instance
It is critical for our self-managed users to upgrade to recent versions of GitLab. Simply put, because new versions contain:
- Important security fixes, without which instances could be compromised
- Product improvements and bug fixes, to improve user experience and productivity
Current state
We currently show whether an instance is up to date in two places:
- Instance help page (
/help), for example gitlab.com/help - Instance settings main page, which requires admin access.
In both cases a small box appears with three states:
- Green: up to date
- Yellow: out of date
- Red: missing critical security fixes
Proposal
Due to the importance of self-managed administrators keeping their instances up to date, we should make this messaging more visible within our UI. We are also looking at automating updates (#15993 (closed)), but that is likely a further out solution and users may opt-out.
As an MVC, we should target ensuring that instance administrators, the users who likely have the power to actually update the instance, are more informed of the update. Today, they have to visit either the help page, or the instance settings page. Neither of these are particularly high traffic.
We could do a few things:
- Add a notification indicator (similar to iOS/Android apps with pending notifications) on the wrench icon for accessing the instance settings menu. This is unobtrusive, but hard to resist
😉 - Add a popup on login, dismissable, which informs the admin that a new feature has been released along with some general information. Ideally it would show an embedded or terse version of the release notes, but as an MVC letting users know whether they are out of date by a feature release or security release (similar to yellow/red indicators) could be useful.
Relevant research
Design
- Spec in Figma
🔗 - Dropdown example - updated available
