I think the GitLab interface is pretty good, especially compared to GitHubs. I can't speak for BitBucket since I've only used it once, but I do remember having a hard time finding my way around it.

Here's a start: http://measuringu.com/essential-metrics/

Are 10 easy clicks worse than 2 hard clicks? Is a long, easy experience better than a short stressful one? And so on. Couldn't that vary by each person's preferences?

I had to do some IT support for a doctor's office many years ago, and (unrelated to what I was doing), had a chance to look at the system the front desk lady used to manage the patients, appointments etc. and it used a "clunky" old text based system (perhaps even DOS based?). TO me, it looked utterly bizarre and incomprehensible. But man, the front desk lady was lightning fast doing anything with it. Of course she trained on the system for years, and just entered keypressed rapidly that didn't make sense to me, but achieved the desired result... So, zero clicks, low search times, no (for me visible) user errors... so I guess they never should have switched, as this was the "objectively optimal" UI?

Personally, I don't think so. I.e. I think the UI could have been better, and easier to learn. But of course it's also important to see how usable it is once you do learn it... I was at that doctor's office again, not so long ago, this time as a patient... new lady (the old one retired, I assume), new system... flashy graphics... everything done with clicking, I don't even know if there still are shortcuts, the new lady certainly didn't seem to use any. And it did feel slower overall -- though this is of course a subjective evaluation only, with many years between the two observations. Plus it's somewhat unfair to compare somebody who trained a decade on a system with somebody who for all I know started a week ago... but I guess that's exactly my point here...

It sounds like you'd find it interesting.

Honestly, all Atlassian products have terrible UI. JIRA is just as bad.

The individual UIs are not that bad. The problem is that people tend to use not only e.g. JIRA, but also Confluence, or more. And then the (massive) differences between their products in UX appear.

As a sysadmin, there's one thing that really annoys me: all that Atlassian stuff is written in Java (which means: on every problem one has to dig through pages after pages of Java stacktraces), and it eats resources like nothing else. GitLab got better in the recent versions, but it also had its fair share of interesting problems with memory leaks.

Oh, and both don't support MySQL (Atlassian does, but very limited) - which is bad if nearly everything else is MySQL and you already have a MySQL DBA.

I've still gotta disagree. Jira's UI is horribly inconsistent and haphazard. Some actions are buttons, some are links, some are hidden until you mouse over, everything feels like it was just tacked on wherever there was (or really wasn't) free space. It's probably the worst UI in a modern, commercial web application that I've encountered.

It feels like they took some Photoshop files from a designer and gave it to their dev team and said "make this, I don't want to hear any complaints."

If you are curious about what we're doing, take a look at the issues under UI Polish: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues?scope=all&utf...

Or feel free to point out any particular concerns here or through the issue tracker: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues

Main complaint overall is the incredibly sluggish git push speed.

git push speed is fine on our own ce installation but gitlab.com is beyond shitty.

We expect it to become a standard component of GitLab in Q1 2017 and to reach full scope in Q3 2017.

These are the top 3 things I can think of, based on my interaction so far. I wish Gitlab success. Thanks.

Remember that git-based products include Gerrit (a UX which I hear hate about, but frankly, I like a lot)