UX Department Performance Indicators

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On this page

• Executive Summary
• Key Performance Indicators
• Regular Performance Indicators
• Other PI Pages
• Legends
  • Maturity
  • Health
• How to work with pages like this
  • Data
  • Pages

Executive Summary

KPI	Health	Reason(s)
UX Hiring Actual vs Plan	Okay	Engineering is on plan. But we are lending some of our recruiters to sales for this quarter. And we just put in place a new "one star minimum" rule that might decrease offer volume. Health: Monitor health closely
UX Average Location Factor	Attention	Our average location factor trended upward to .67 in Q4 FY20 due to hiring for more complex stage groups. We are actively working with recruiting to target the right areas of the globe on a per role basis, and we expect to see this average go down in Q1 FY21.
Perception of system usability	Attention	Perceived usability rates as a B- to a low B. Continue to action on UX Scorecards for every stage group.
Ratio of proactive vs reactive UX work	Attention	We're on track to deliver 1 solution validation issue per Product Designer in Q3 FY20. Current velocity per team member is good, but we suspect that velocity may also be temporarily challenging as we onboard more Product Designers who will take time to ramp up.
UI beautification	Okay	Of 114 total issues, 110 have been closed. 4 open issues remain. Q4 FY20 OKR has been very successful. We'll close this epic at the end of the quarter.

Key Performance Indicators

UX Hiring Actual vs Plan

Are we able to hire high quality workers to build our product vision in a timely manner? Hiring information comes from BambooHR where employees are in the division `Engineering`.

URL(s)

• /handbook/hiring/charts/ux-department/

Health: Okay

• Engineering is on plan. But we are lending some of our recruiters to sales for this quarter. And we just put in place a new "one star minimum" rule that might decrease offer volume.
• Health: Monitor health closely

Maturity: Level 1 of 3

• Needs a target

UX Average Location Factor

We remain efficient financially if we are hiring globally, working asynchronously, and hiring great people in low-cost regions where we pay market rates. We track an average location factor by function and department so managers can make tradeoffs and hire in an expensive region when they really need specific talent unavailable elsewhere, and offset it with great people who happen to be in low cost areas.

URL(s)

• /handbook/hiring/charts/ux-department/

Health: Attention

• Our average location factor trended upward to .67 in Q4 FY20 due to hiring for more complex stage groups.
• We are actively working with recruiting to target the right areas of the globe on a per role basis, and we expect to see this average go down in Q1 FY21.

Maturity: Level 1 of 3

• Needs a target

Perception of system usability

The System Usability Scale (SUS) is an industry-standard survey that measures overall system usability based on 10 questions. Moving a SUS score upward even a couple of points on a large system is a significant change. The goal of this KPI is to understand how usability of the GitLab product rates against industry standards and then track trends over time. Even though UX will be responsible for this metric, they will need other departments such as PM and Development to positively affect change. See Table 1 for grading details.

Target: B+

URL(s)

• https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RzoYgjIH8RYiUxEJmUb7f_hTy83vTxpRtJS4AL0Ekrk/edit?usp=sharing

Chart (Periscope↗)

Health: Attention

• Perceived usability rates as a B- to a low B.
• Continue to action on UX Scorecards for every stage group.

Maturity: Level 3 of 3

Ratio of proactive vs reactive UX work

Use customer research to validate solutions. This includes feedback from the wider GitLab community gathered via multiple comments, a survey, usability study, card sort/tree test, and/or user interviews. Hypothesis that there is a connection between this KPI and SUS KPI.

Target: 2 solution validation issues per Product Designer per quarter

Chart (Periscope↗)

Health: Attention

• We're on track to deliver 1 solution validation issue per Product Designer in Q3 FY20. Current velocity per team member is good, but we suspect that velocity may also be temporarily challenging as we onboard more Product Designers who will take time to ramp up.

Maturity: Level 3 of 3

UI beautification

Burndown of "UI polish" issues completed in the Beautifying our UI epic. The aesthetics of our UI impacts its perceived usability. See the Beautifying our UI epic.

Target: 0 open issues

Chart (Periscope↗)

Health: Okay

• Of 114 total issues, 110 have been closed. 4 open issues remain.
• Q4 FY20 OKR has been very successful. We'll close this epic at the end of the quarter.

Maturity: Level 3 of 3

Regular Performance Indicators

UX Scorecard improvements

UX Scorecards score the current usability of a workflow and track its improvements over time. Even though UX will be responsible for this metric, they will need other departments such as PM and Development to positively affect change.

Target: B+ on all scores

Chart (Periscope↗)

Health: Okay

• Work with PM to continue prioritizing improvements to existing workflows.

Maturity: Level 3 of 3

UX debt

UX Debt means that for a given issue, we failed to meet defined standards for our Design system or for usability and feature viability standards as defined in agreed-upon design assets. When we fail to ship something according to defined standards, we track the resulting issues with a "UX debt" label. Even though UX will be responsible for this metric, they will need other departments such as PM and Development to positively affect change.

Target: Under 50 open "ux debt" issues

Chart (Periscope↗)

Health: Attention

• Open "UX debt" issues are growing over time. Average days to close a "UX debt" issue is unacceptable.
• Influence Product Management to prioritize "UX debt" issues more quickly. Work closely with Engineering to help prevent "UX debt" issues from occurring.
• We're working with Quality Engineering to add UX Debt to the weekly triage issue.

Maturity: Level 3 of 3

Throughput of Technical Writing team documentation MRs

This KPI tracks the number of ~documentation MRs merged every month across all GitLab projects which have involvement (review, collaboration, or authoring) from the ~"Technical Writing" team. The goal is to increase velocity over time as the team grows.

Target: 25 MRs per technical writer per month

Chart (Periscope↗)

Health: Okay

• Current velocity per team member is good, but we suspect that increasing the proportion of proactive documentation efforts will also increase this velocity, while the hiring plan will lead to a greater overall team velocity.
• Automate application of the "Technical Writing" label when the team is involved.
• Continue to improve onboarding process to get new Technical Writers' productivity up to speed quickly.
• Working to get Periscope dashboard to display correct data.

Maturity: Level 3 of 3

Distribution of Technical Writing team documentation effort

Tracks the type of documentation changes involving the ~"Technical Writing" team, based on `docs::` scoped label applied. Labels include feature, new, improvement, fix, revamp, or housekeeping. Our goal is to increase the proportion of proactive 'revamp' efforts; cases where the content is mostly rewritten or restructured for an improved user experience.

Target: 10% of MRs are revamps

Chart (Periscope↗)

Health: Attention

• September 2019 had us at 2.5%, with October efforts likely to exceed 4%. Further planning and focus is needed to continue the upward trend.
• Plan further revamp issues for FY 2020 Q4.
• Automation to prompt contributors to consistently add the scoped labels.
• Working to get Periscope dashboard to display correct data.

Maturity: Level 3 of 3

Other PI Pages

• Performance Indicator Maturity Table
• Engineering Function Performance Indicators
  • Development Department Performance Indicators
    • Growth Section Performance Indicators
  • Infrastructure Department Performance Indicators
  • Quality Department Performance Indicators
  • Security Department Performance Indicators
  • Support Department Performance Indicators
  • UX Department Performance Indicators
• Data Team Metrics Overview

Legends

Maturity

Level	Meaning
Level 3 of 3	Has a description, target, and periscope data.
Level 2 of 3	Missing one of: description, target, or periscope data.
Level 1 of 3	Missing two of: description, target, or periscope data.
Level 0 of 3	Missing a description, a target, and periscope data.

Health

Level	Meaning
Okay	The KPI is at an acceptable level compared to the threshold
Attention	This is a blip, or we’re going to watch it, or we just need to enact a proven intervention
Problem	We'll prioritize our efforts here
Unknown	Unknown

How to work with pages like this

Data

The heart of pages like this is a data file called /data/performance_indicators.yml which is in YAML format. Almost everything you need to do will involve edits to this file. Here are some tips:

• Avoid : in strings as it's an important character in YAML and will confuse the data parsing process. Put the string in "quotes" if you really need to use a :
• urls: should be an array (indented lines starting with dashes) even if you only have one url
• Both maturity.level and health.level take a number between 0 and 3 (inclusive)

Pages

Pages like /handbook/engineering/performance-indicators/ are rendered by and ERB template.

These ERB templates call the helper function performance_indicators() that is defined in /helpers/custom_helpers.rb. This helper function calls in several partial templates to do it's work.

This function takes a required argument named org in string format that limits the scope of the page to a portion of the data file. Possible valid values for this org argument are listed in the org property of each element in the array in /data/performance_indicators.yml.