Poor user experience for private projects when not logged in

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We have a recurring issue where engineers in our organization do not realize they have access to SonarCloud due to the confusing UI/UX when trying to view details on a scan for a private project.

The current flow is:

  1. SonarCloud PR check fails in GitHub
  2. Engineer clicks “See analysis details on SonarCloud” link
  3. Engineer sees the following page:

While the message mentions that they should make sure they “are authenticated to SonarCloud with a user account with permission to view the project”, the primary message is from the red banner on top of the screen, which states that the “Project doesn’t exist”.

Additionally, the only CTA is to “Go back to the homepage”.

There is a “Log In” button in the top right corner of the page, but it’s not always visible. You can see in my screenshot above that at certain page widths the responsiveness of that portion of the layout stops working, and you have to scroll horizontally (or make your window wider) in order to see the “Log In” button.

As a result, many engineers who reach this page don’t know that they just need to login before they’re able to see the results of the scan, and think they are either missing permissions or that the whole project is broken or deleted.

Suggested Improvements

  1. Remove the “Project doesn’t exist” banner that pops up briefly, or reword this message (particularly when the user is not logged in)
  2. If the user is not logged in, update the CTA from “Go back to the homepage” to “Log in” (or add this as a second CTA)
  3. Update the UI for the top nav bar so that the “Log in” button is always visible (or at least remains visible until it would collide with the search button)

Hi there.

We are going to update this message soon.

1 Like

And, follow-up, you have some great ideas regarding making things more clear. I’ve passed those along as well.