Design Process Discussion: 2025-07-03

👋 Let's pilot a design critique for the Create Product Design team! Don't forget to embrace our mantra: Critique the work, not the person. Care personally, challenge directly. Speak candidly, listen openly. Embrace curiosity, let go of attachment. 🙏 We ended up doing an impromptu design process discussion.

📌 Pinned items

• Recording:
• Presenter: @gdoyle
• Host: Impromptu so kinda @gdoyle
• Participants: @gdoyle @mle @alyssatrinh @munthank

🔗 Links & Resources

• Context: @alyssatrinh brought up a good example of complexities and inefficiencies within the design handoff process. Also mentioning that it'd be beneficial to start planning further ahead of time for design. Goal is to share this to see what's happening across the groups in Create and see what steps everyone is taking during the handoff process, use the findings to make the process more efficient.
• Work that exists for this topic already:
  • https://docs.gitlab.com/development/contributing/design/#handoff
  • https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/product-development/how-we-work/product-development-flow/

🗣️ Presentation

See google doc for all notes

🔊 AI Feedback Summary

The UX design team met to discuss improving their design critique process and address challenges in the design handoff workflow at GitLab. The team explored issues around incomplete designs being passed to developers, accessibility concerns, and the need to adapt traditional design processes to GitLab's action-oriented environment. They concluded by agreeing to formalize their design critique process through better planning, external participant inclusion, and improved documentation, while also discussing the implementation of a "definition of done" checklist to ensure design completeness.

✅ Action items

• @gdoyle to create a new Zoom meeting setup for future UX design sync calls.
• @gdoyle to start appointing team members to bring specific work for design critiques.
• @alyssatrinh @munthank @mle Send Gina examples of their contributions to Pajamas, focusing on challenges faced.
• @gdoyle to create a "definition of done" issue template and tag team members for feedback.
• @gdoyle to meet with Chris to discuss examples of collaboration attempts with the Pajamas team.
• In future design critiques, consider inviting additional relevant team members to design critiques on a case-by-case basis.
• Facilitator: Add "Quick recap" from Zoom AI Summary to the Feedback Summary section.
• Facilitator: Add any relevant "Next steps" from Zoom AI summary to the action items and assign them.
• Facilitator: Download Zoom recording and upload it to the Create UX playlist on the GitLab Unfiltered YouTube channel. Check if the video is SAFE to share publicly or must be kept private. Add YouTube link to the top of the issue.
• Facilitator: Share the link to this issue in #s_create_ux, and add a point to the UX Week in Review.