Banner Cleanup - Phase 2: Designer Hackathon - First-Time Feature Experience

Summary

A time-boxed team event where Product Designers audit the first-time user experience in their respective product areas to identify banner cleanup opportunities. This builds on Phase 1 learnings and distributes the banner cleanup effort across the design team.

Problem

GitLab has 753+ banner (banners, alerts, and broadcast messages) instances across the product. Phase 1 focused on onboarding and registration flows. Phase 2 expands the cleanup to first-time feature usage across all product areas, leveraging the entire design team's expertise in their domains.

Goals

  1. Audit first-time user experience across all major product areas
  2. Identify banners, alerts, and broadcast messages that confuse or overwhelm users trying a feature for the first time
  3. Provide recommendations for 50-100 banner, alert, broadcast message improvements
  4. Create team engagement and ownership of banner, alert, broadcast message quality
  5. Establish pattern for ongoing banner, alert, broadcast message quality maintenance

Scope

In Scope

Each designer reviews first-time usage of their product area:

  • What banners, alerts, broadcast messages appear when user first encounters this feature?
  • Which are helpful vs. confusing vs. unnecessary?
  • Are there stacking issues?
  • Recommendations for improvement

Product Areas to Cover:

  • Code/Repository (files, commits, branches) - Merge Requests/Code Review
  • CI/CD (pipelines, runners, jobs)
  • Issues & Planning (boards, milestones, iterations)
  • Security & Compliance (scanning, policies, vulnerabilities)
  • Package & Container Registry
  • Wiki & Documentation
  • Deploy (environments, feature flags, releases)
  • Monitor/Analytics
  • Settings & Configuration
  • Admin Area

Out of Scope

  • Deep/expert user workflows (focus on first-time experience only)
  • Comprehensive audit of every page (focus on entry points)
  • Design System component changes (to the design system)

Success Metrics

Participation

  • Designers participating: Target 100% of product design team
  • Product areas covered: All major areas reviewed

Output

  • Banners, alerts, broadcast messages reviewed: Target 200-300
  • MRs submitted by designers: Target 20+
  • Recommendations for engineering: Target 30-60

Quality

  • Clear documentation (issues created)
  • Screenshots provided
  • Priorities assigned
  • Actionable next steps
Edited by Valerie Karnes