UX Department

Maintained by:

Hello!

We're the GitLab User Experience (UX) department. We comprise four areas to support designing and building the GitLab product.

Our goal is to make our product easy to use, supportive of contributions from the wider GitLab community, and built for a diverse global community. We want GitLab to be the easiest and most delightful product in its class.

We hope you find what you are looking for here. If you don't, please open an issue and give us feedback.

How we work

We support all users from beginners to experts. We believe that GitLab software should be unintimidating and accessible for a beginner, without oversimplifying important features for advanced users. We stay with users every step of the way to help them learn fast as a beginner and then become an expert over time.
We're building one product, together. We're highly focused on ensuring that no matter how big our product gets, the entire experience stays cohesive, consistent, and interconnected.
We're humble facilitators of user experience design. Everyone is a designer; everyone can contribute. We are not egotistical, moody experts who alone hold the keys to user delight. We encourage Product Managers, Engineers, and the wider GitLab community to contribute to creating an exceptional user experience.
We look for small changes and big impacts. Sometimes the simplest, most boring solution is what is needed to make users successful. We want our UI to stay out of the user’s way. We work iteratively to make modest but valuable changes that make users more productive, faster, and better at accomplishing their tasks.
We're informed by empathy. We’re human, and we design for humans, so we strive for understanding, self-awareness, and connection. We are quirky, and we introduce our quirks into designs when appropriate.
When we find problems that are simple to fix, we are empowered to make those changes ourselves. If a change will take you less than 15 minutes to make (for example, a minor change to our website or microcopy in the product), then start with an MR instead of an issue. By making the change yourself, you are taking immediate action to improve our product, and you might learn a new skill, too! If it seems simple, but you have questions, remember that there are people who can help you with code changes both in the UX department and across the company. (Even Sid is willing to help, if you need it.)

Learn more about how we work within our department and with cross-functional partners.

Continuous learning

We are always learning! Visit the UX Learning and Development page for resources geared toward team members in the UX Department or anyone wanting to understand what we do.

Personas we use

Existing personas are documented within the handbook.

New personas or updates to existing personas can be added at any time.

Personas should be:

Informed by research
Driven by job title or feature
Gender neutral

Areas of Responsibility

Pajamas Design System: To ensure that everyone can contribute to GitLab with confidence we provide everyone with the right resources and know-how. The Pajamas design system is the single source of truth for everything anyone needs to know about contributing to the GitLab UI. The UX Department owns the visual and interaction design. We work with the various categories to utilize Pajamas during feature implementation.
Navigation: Navigation is an extremely important part of the user experience. Our goal is to design the navigation structure around how users think about our product, not how we're internally structured. Learn how to make changes to navigation.
System Usability Scale: We measure the usability of our product with the industry-standard System Usability Scale (SUS) methodlogy. Our UX Research team is responsible for defining our process and running the survey once per quarter, but all of UX and Product Management are responsible for attaining an industry-leading score.
UX Scorecards: As we grow our platform, we want to keep evaluating the user experience of various tasks and flows to make sure we are tracking progress and improvements over time. UX Scorecards are our framework for achieving this goal.
Assessing Category Maturity: We listen to our users and grade the maturity of our product based on user performance and feedback. Assessing Category Maturity outlines the methodology we use for these evaluations.
Technical Documentation: Our users need reliable documentation, as it helps keep track of all aspects of a platform and it improves on the quality of a software product. We manage docs.gitlab.com, as well as related processes and tooling.
First Look: Inviting users into everything we do is important to us. First Look is our user engagement and research participant recruiting program, which enables us to connect with our users and get their thoughts on our product.
UX Showcase: Collaboration is one of our values. Our UX Showcase is a fortnightly presentation of notable User Experience projects, where Product Designers from every stage group take turns sharing their accomplishments to collect feedback.

Meet Some of Our Team Members

This section is inspired by the recent trend of Engineering Manager READMEs. e.g., Hackernoon: 12 Manager READMEs (from some of the best cultures in tech). Get to know more about the people on our team!

Christie Lenneville - VP of User Experience
Valerie Karnes - Director of Product Design
Jacki Bauer - Product Design Manager
Justin Mandell - Product Design Manager
Taurie Davis - Senior Product Design Manager
Rayana Verissimo - Product Design Manager
Jeremy Elder - Staff Product Designer, Foundations
Austin Regnery - Senior Product Designer
Anne Lasch - Senior UX Researcher
Emily Bauman - Senior Product Designer
Will Leidheiser - Staff UX Researcher