8
votes
Usability Suggestion: Mobile sidebar closing.
Edit: As @Bauke pointed out, apparently this feature already exists via tapping outside of the sidebar. I never even thought to try that.
I'm not sure if this is in the gitlab issues or not, but a cursory search suggested it's not. On mobile, if you tap the link to the most recent comment from the sidebar, you navigate directly to that comment just as on the desktop site, but the sidebar remains open and can't be closed without scrolling all the way back up to the top of the page. This is incredibly cumbersome and inconvenient.
Ideally there would either be a method of closing the sidebar from anywhere, or for the sidebar to close on clicking the link. I would imagine that the latter would be simplest.
Oh. Huh. How about that. That's really unintuitive to me. Thanks for pointing that out!
It's pretty standard for clicking/tapping outside an "on top" element like a slide-in sidebar or a modal dialog to close it.
I think it should be pretty easy to make the "last comment" link also just close the sidebar when you tap it though, I'll test it out in a little bit.
I've actually never used click-outside functionality for closing sidebars specifically. In mobile apps I've always used the equivalent of the "back" button, so I never realized that tapping outside worked. For desktop software and websites, I seldom ever encounter sidebars, and when I do they're usually closed with an explicit action rather than clicking outside of them. For modals, dropdowns, and other elements like that I'm accustomed to being able to click/tap outside, but sidebars have always been different for me.
Though I could just be an anomaly on this :)
Alright, sidebar should automatically close now when you tap that link to go to the most recent comment.
I don't think what you're asking for is too far off. I believe UX/UI best practice would have the side nav close on navigation/click event. Even if it is on the same page.