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Design Critique: 2025-09-08 - The Review Workflow

👋 Welcome to the Create Product Design team's design critique! 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. 🙏

📌 Pinned items

🗣️ Presentation

1) Review states

With the MR homepage, there are instances where approvals get reset and that triggers a "review request" back to the reviewer but in many cases the changes are not ready to review. It appears that there needs to be a new state called "Assigned but not requested"?

The proposed solution to this is to introduce this state as Approval reset and this is something that will be visible in the merge request and the MR homepage. This would prevent the reviewer getting a review requested notification until someone re-requests their review.

While working on this there are other areas of the approval flow that could be changed to help give feedback of current review state.

  1. Right now there are two places to "approve" a merge request. The approval widget could potentially be removed from the page.
  2. Reviewers can request changes but the button is always "Your review".
  3. When you request changes it is unclear on how to reset/remove that request.
Feedback request

The buttons are ugly. Focus more on the review states.

Does this make sense to you?

Links for Review states
  1. Current review states (micro): Figma
  2. Problems and areas of improvement: Figma
  3. Proposed solutions to review workflow: Figma
    1. Showing your current review approval state
    2. Handling revoke/reset with "Approval reset" state that requires "re-request review"

2) Visual representation of Review states in the sidebar

With the panel work underway, this is an exploration of how to make the review states clear and help guide the reviewer through the flow by highlighting their required action.

Feedback request
  1. Visually does this look good?
  2. Information hierarchy, is this an improvement on the existing placement of the merge widget, comment navigation, and Submit review button?
  3. How might you want to be guided in doing a code review (think to your first time doing a review)?
Links for Visual exploration
  1. Exploration walkthrough: Figma
  2. Prototype: Figma
  3. Mobile exploration: Figma

🔊 AI Feedback Summary

The team discussed various issues and improvements needed for the merge request and code review processes, focusing on approval workflows, visual indicators, and user interface design. Michael presented several design concepts for improving the review page interface, including mobile and desktop views, while the team explored ways to measure success and address user pain points. The discussion concluded with plans to research user satisfaction and document findings, with an emphasis on connecting these discussions to micro-journey user experiences.

✅ Action items

  • Exploration for widget @mle
  • Connect with Ben on the larger questions about code review problems and if the review feature is solving those @mle
  • Add to micro-journey @mle
  • 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.
Edited by Gina Doyle