 Oh that last minute's always the longest. All right. It's 11 o'clock Welcome everybody to the UX functional update. I haven't done one in a while Last one fell right on top of GitLab summit and there just wasn't much time to fit it in So I'm gonna do some updates here particularly on OKRs And on a new format for our FGU moving forward And Quickly for anyone new to the company. This is the UX team You can reach out to any of us on the team if you have questions about issues curious about how UX works Coffee chat But this is the team so let's start with OKRs today So we have some some really important OKRs this time around I'm really excited about them The first of which is to document GitLab standards and update the style guide The current GitLab UX guide is a little bit outdated Designs change often making manual updates to this guide has proved to be a pretty time-consuming task The current guide is largely text-based and does not provide detailed visuals of patterns and components for either other UX members or front-enders working on an issue So the goal here for this OKR is to make sure that we're documenting standards and providing a visual guide for Internal as well as external in the community So doing so helps us increase usability and user adoption So visual standards and style guidelines provide consistency within an organization and with end users It speeds up our overall process So the availability of proven design solutions allows designers and product managers alike to solve problems quickly without reinventing the wheel Once we have these patterns established, it's perfectly reasonable that a PM or even somebody in the community With an idea could take one of our existing patterns as the solution and start from there And it's a little bit less Need to involve UX once those are established Also provides clear communications across disciplines and time zones. So referencing patterns from our own library allows For quick clear communication of visual concepts So a lot less ambiguity and back and forth on issues trying to understand what it is we need Also retention of organizational knowledge and efficient training of new team members and In the end hopefully improved UI polished Using reusable code based on patterns requires less testing time than a product that doesn't leverage patents I know Phillipa has been working on stuff like that lately with us Making some patterns that we use quite a bit So that's kind of the the the main crux of our OKRs right now is to really establish this guide Completely flesh it out and get those visuals and the rest of the OKRs you'll see are really supporting this overall goal So our first step in building more accessible documentation is through the implementation of a proper design pattern library So after a lot of trial and error with sketch Native options as well as third-party plugins freebies everything that we could think of to try We did settle on brand AI as the best tool for the job And just to understand a little bit about why brand I brand AI was the best tool For designers and for anybody else context switching is a productivity killer and What the brand AI plug-in allows us to do is viewer assets and styles side-by-side with the design when we're working on them So there's no switching pages or browsing to a reference site The plug-in polls from a central sketch file, but designers never have to open that file They never have to add remove or update any design elements. So it allows us to Work with those elements through the pop plug-in update simultaneously automatically It allows us to always see the most up-to-date version of our design system without having to retrieve a new version We have the ability to search the library and multiple designers cannot make automatic updates to that library So in short for us the pros are consistency across files a single source of truth Upkeep is automated and that burden is taken off designers Automatic style guide generation and then it's significantly speeds up design time We've seen quite an increase in our ability to to kind of get through designs so that's something we're actively using right now and If you look at the meta issue I've linked to you'll see that there's a whole list of all the patterns that we need to define What we're doing there is we're not only getting them inside of brand AI so that we can use them when designing But we're also documenting in each of those issues the usage the do's the don'ts Everything you need to understand how a component should be used should be rendered the different active states everything for that and That information is going to actually feed into another one of our okay ours Did I skip one? Hold on one second. I totally did. There we go I knew that didn't look right. All right Clicked it twice So this Component library while that's something that design is using to increase our productivity and then improve our process it it is going to Cascade down and enable us to launch the first iteration of design dot get lab dot com and what that is is it's a place for designers to collaborate More efficiently with the team and the community So therefore our goal here is to replace the existing static UX guide We talked about in the beginning with this living documentation using storybook So you can add stories to this Storybook each story is is basically an area in this you can see this one is buttons So the the story is buttons and each component is a piece of that story And what that enables people to do is you're working on something You're not sure which button what the what it should look like how it should be used You can come here and reference it quickly. You don't need to ping the designer. You don't need to wait for anybody It's already established. It's already there. You can even grab the code snippet This is still uh experimental Uh, we're putting it together. This is phase one So we expect there to be quite a bit of of things that we need to work out But the goal here is not only to include components, but also to include List of again do's and don'ts And all the documentation that we need for our UX And with all of this work that we're doing as we strengthen polish the user experience and interface of get love Um, it's really important that we share our successes process with team members and the greater community So sharing case studies and best practices allows team members to understand the work going into the issues that matter most to the company Hopefully it will also give greater insight into what goes into the UX process and how everyone can contribute On the flip side it allows our customers and community to see that improving user experience is a high priority And that we listen closely to their concerns And finally sharing our processes as thought leaders in the area of UX will help us to attract talent from around the globe Now my favorite part Hiring abby you're smiling. I mean we're making so much work for you So gitlab has grown Significantly, um, it's been amazing just in the time I've been here to see um all the awesome new people We've been bringing on board and and the gearing up for the roadmap for 2018 and I'm really excited And I'll be more excited when I have enough people to help So we are um to keep up obviously with this ever-increasing demand for UX research and UX design. We're growing our team So please help us spread the word Um, there are links here to the UX designer opening and UX researcher. We're actually hiring two UX designers Intermediate Open open to to maybe A little bit lower a little bit higher. There's not a real Not a stickler for the level. It's really more about The work and the fit And the researcher position is a junior position And you can see the awesome stats and this is from Yesterday, I know that there's even more stats now. I saw a bunch of applications came through But people ops has been rocking it going through 23 applicants for the UX designer and 18 for the UX researcher and I swear it's been under two weeks I don't I don't even think it's been that long. I personally have four interviews. I'll be doing this week So thank you everyone for for helping with this. This is very important for our team So moving on usually what we do in our our functional group updates is we kind of Do the what what's coming up in the next release? What are the some of the issues we've been working on then we talk about issues that are in progress And then we talk about UX ready issues we'd like to have scheduled And we're slowly going to move away from that format um one because I think that What's coming up in a milestone is is covered quite well in the kickoff And I don't want to repeat Information especially as other functional groups give their talks We're all working on a lot of the similar stuff obviously So my focus here is going to be really today talking about UX ready issues that we'd like to prioritize And then moving forward on process And other things and I'll touch on that at the end but for right now I'm going to talk about some UX ready issues So there's a quick overview. There's a total of 183 open issues in CE and EE Where the UX work is complete and that don't have any milestone attached to them So these are things sitting out there that UX has worked on collaborated with front end back end whoever was involved It is ready to go but for one reason or another has not been scheduled Often they've been scheduled and then pushed back or pulled pulled aside from from a milestone And this is just a quick breakdown by product These are UX ready issues by area with no milestone attached whatsoever So when iterating on a feature we ship the smallest change possible with the intention of improving the UX over the next several releases Unfortunately, these improvements don't always happen for a variety of reasons shifting priorities lack of capacity these things do happen And definitely not every UX ready issue should necessarily be scheduled But moving forward the UX team will be making it a priority and a point to evaluate And prioritize UX ready issues during release planning Doing so will help us to make rapid improvements to existing features while closing out of date issues It's also going to help us in our effort efforts to get ahead UX ideally would like to be a little bit ahead of platform and a little bit ahead of front end and presenting UX ready issues to them So Using these UX ready issues will give us a little bit more leeway inside of each release to to work on other things Again, this is something that we'll be doing prioritizing going through and making sure that If it's something that's been UX ready for over a year and is out of date It gets closed out at that point. It's probably not worth doing But there might be some really easy wins that we can get in there and make some rapid improvements And UX bugs this is another one So there are currently 56 issues labeled with bug and UX with no assigned milestone In order to reduce waste of time UX does not typically work on an unscheduled issue Doing so creates a backlog of UX ready issues that may or may not ever be implemented like the exact exact scenario I was just talking about So it's one of those things in terms of how we handle bugs. It might be something to look at an opportunity To maybe better handle bugs and get them on the schedule and get them out there There are 10 issues labeled with bug and no assigned milestone that are UX ready So we do need your help In order for the UX team to prioritize these issues, we have a blocking bug It's really annoying So currently when trying to reorder items on the boards, these items can only be moved up by a maximum amount of the height of the viewport So for example, if you have 100 items on the backlog and your current browser size is only showing you 10 You can only move the bottom 10 up 10 at a time So when you're reordering large lists, it makes it really really difficult You have to really remember where things were and what we're actually trying to do is is prioritize these UX ready issues in a list So that we can start knocking through them closing them out and getting them scheduled So if anybody's interested That bug is there And then as I said improving the UX FGU Past UX FGUs have focused mostly on works in progress And I feel have maybe been a little repetitive simply because we're all working on the same things So future FGUs will focus on sharing UX process Standards and the evolving vision for design at GitLab We would love your input and ideas for what like you'd like to see and learn in the FGU if you want to learn more about practices About techniques the different ways that we do Design and research for how we ideate We'd love to show you that so just let us know And Questions, okay We go to the chat See if there's any questions Yes, Cortland. So Cortland says what about design on the marketing side? Uh, I think that we'd want marketing designers to benefit from these same style standards um Dimitri says here, there's a separate repository But I do know also that in the outline for design dot git lab dot com We have a marketing section and we've been working with luke on that Luke has been awesome about collaborating with us. He jumps into our meetings Comments on the issue and he's keeping an eye on the work we're doing So he's definitely involved in this and I agree coreland. It makes total sense for us to collaborate on this Um, um, let's see. I know filipa. I know it can't happen fast enough for me filipa Um Let's see. Oh and I see tori already answered. Thanks tori. I should have known all right So and pager did say design dot git lab will also serve as a playground for fv and ux to improve and try out components Absolutely. Yep Awesome. Are there any other questions? Is there anything else I can answer? going once going twice Last slide Huge huge. Thank you. I've said it once. I'll say it again people ops. You rock um We're just all amazed at at the lightning speed. You're you're going through candidates and and getting people Screamed and over to us and scheduled and chloe helped me get all kinds of Um, really long tedious interview questions loaded up into templates, which was unbelievably helpful um So thank you for that and then winnie and simon have been invaluable in helping us with design dot git lab dot com Without them we would be nowhere right now. Um, so thank you. Thank you for all the work you did at the summit and since then And with that I will let you go Thanks everybody. Have a good day