UX Showcase

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On this page

• About UX Showcase
  • Purpose
  • Audience
  • Schedule
• Presenting
  • Preparation
  • Helpful tips for presenters
• Hosting
  • Recording the presentations
  • Sharing on GitLab Unfiltered
    • Helpful tips
  • Updating the schedule

About UX Showcase

The UX Showcase is a recurring meeting that allows each stage group to walk through various research findings and design solutions. We record the 15-minute presentations, so that stakeholders from Product, UX, Engineering, and Leadership can watch at their convenience. These sessions are available on GitLab Unfiltered.

Purpose

• Increase awareness of the value delivered through UX by highlighting business and customer value
• Increase visibility into UX research, design opportunities, and solutions
• Increase exposure of stage group UX activities to the broader organization

Audience

• Stage Group Product Designer, Researcher, and/or Technical Writer (Presenter)
• Product
• Engineering
• Relevant Leadership (VP of UX, VP of Development, CEO, VP of Product)

Schedule

UX Showcases are scheduled every two weeks. They are 60 minutes long to allow up to four team members to present from the host's team.

• To be inclusive of our distributed team, we alternate the meeting start time every other occurrence to be either Americas/LAC/EMEA friendly or APAC friendly.
• Check the schedule to see when your stage group's manager is hosting.
  • Due to time zone restrictions for managers, the APAC UX Showcase can have a Product Designer as alternative host.
• If you see your manager's name as the next UX Showcase host, it means you or someone from your stage will need to present that day.
  • Work with your manager to determine who from your stage will be presenting.
• Each presenter is expected to fill out the agenda (attached to the meeting invite) for that week prior to presenting.

Date ('22)	Host
2022-05-25	Taurie
2022-06-08	Marcel
2022-06-22	Rayana
2022-07-06	Blair
2022-07-20	Jacki
2022-08-03	Justin
2022-08-17	Taurie
2022-08-31	APAC (Marcel)
2022-09-14	Marcel
2022-09-28	Rayana
2022-10-12	Blair
2022-10-26	Jacki
2022-11-09	Justin
2022-11-23	Taurie
2022-12-07	APAC (Rayana)
2022-12-21	Marcel

Update schedule

Presenting

Each presentation is 15 minutes. If you need more time to present a complex topic, ask the moderator about having less people present at that showcase.

Presenters should come prepared with sufficient artifacts to tell a story. Use your best judgment to determine what will most effectively convey the story: a few slides, a process diagram, a journey map, a series of mockups, a prototype, and so on.

Preparation for the UX Showcase should be minimal. Ideally, you should present your topic without creating dedicated slides or assets. The UX Showcase is all about sharing your work in progress, not fancy storytelling. See more helpful tips

Examples of minimal UX Showcase presentations:

• Fulfillment: Improve provisioning and onboarding of new sales assisted GitLab com subscribers
• Secure: Validating and prioritizing your roadmap
• Secure: Group-level security scanner status widget
• Secure: Security Workflow Iterations

Preparation

Preparation time should be minimal, as you'll present the work you've done thus far.

• Prior to the showcase, communicate your specific topic in the meeting agenda.
• Provide context for the problem you were trying to solve:
  • The scope of the problem
  • Why was it important to solve?
  • What did we learn during research?
  • Were there any constraints that impacted the solution?
• State the desired goals of the work:
  • What is the desired business and customer outcome?
  • Ideally, describe the JTDB
    • When, [users' context]. I want to [user's goal]. So I can [users's desired outcome].
  • What were the constraints?
  • How did you iterate toward an MVC?
• Walk your audience through the solution iterations:
  • You might prepare a few slides, but this is optional
  • Be yourself and tell the story of the work you did
  • Use existing mockups and flows, rather than creating something new

Helpful tips for presenters

• Introduce yourself and provide context for your presentation.
• Make the participant experience an enjoyable one: avoid moving around too fast (for example, when showing a Figma prototype), or back and forth between views because you forgot to say one thing at the previous one.
• When sharing your screen, consider going fullscreen so that the audience can see the details of your presentation.
• Make sure the minimum font size of text in your presentation is large enough so that it can easily be read by everyone.
• Provide links in the agenda doc that are relevant to your story, such as, issues, epics, Figma files, Mural boards, and recordings.
• When presenting directly from Figma files and issues, consider preparing an outline of the things you want to cover beforehand, filling in a few details of points you want to mention. Use this as a guide while you present your showcase to make it more linear & easy to follow for the audience.
• Is your internet connection limited? Stop the Zoom camera feed or try these tips.
• Ask people to share their questions after a section of your presentation.
• It’s normal to have anxiety when everyone is looking at you. Remember: We’re here to support each other, not to judge each other.

Read more about presentation tips in the communication handbook page.

Hosting

Product Design Managers take turns hosting the UX Showcase. Managers can use the UX Showcase issue template to create a tracking issue for their team's showcase. See how to use templates.

Recording the presentations

To limit the amount of post-presentation editing, please start and stop (not pause) the recording with each presentation. This will ensure that each presentation saves as an individual clip, which is much faster to edit than a 1-hour clip. Choose "record to computer" each time you record.

Sharing on GitLab Unfiltered

If you need to edit the videos at all, you can use a video editor like iMovie.

Otherwise,

1. Locate the video clips on your computer
2. Name the videos with "UX Showcase" + the title of the presentation
3. Check with presenters to make sure the video is appropriate for the public (no customer names)
4. Upload the videos to GitLab Unfiltered
5. Add the videos to the UX Showcase playlist and UX Team playlist
6. Set the visibility to Public
   • NOTE: If the video content contains items that are unSAFE mark the video as Private.
7. Share the YouTube links in #ux and #product Slack channels with a brief description of each presentation
   • Add the same update to the Engineering Week-in-Review document. The document is available in the description of our internal "eng-week-in-review" Slack channel.

Helpful tips

• If you cannot find the videos in your Zoom account, reach out to the calendar event owner, as it probably uploaded to their account.
• In iMovie, you can upload a video straight to YouTube, as long as it's under 15 minutes long. But you still have to go to YouTube to select the playlist.
• You can pick a better thumbnail and edit other settings after uploading by going to the Uploads page and selecting your video
• More info about using YouTube

Updating the schedule

After the sessions are over, update the UX showcase schedule.