Hacker News Reader

Comment by izolate | Hacker News Reader

Congrats on the funding! Please hire (and learn to take seriously) a design team.

Gitlab's design is fine. Hiring new designers now will only lead them to change everything to prove themselves and make things worse and unpractical in the process, Google style.

I kind of dislike the change that happened a couple of months ago, where instead of going to CI straight from the homepage to see if the build in the only project that is actually using CI is successful, I now have to go to the project (they are sorted by the recent activity, so I have to chase the one with the CI), then into Pipelines, and, from that screen, I can't see which branch was built, so I need one more click to get into the Builds tab.

Other than that, I'm perfectly satisfied with the design.

Glad to hear you like the design overall. Would it help for your use case to add pipelines to the left side menu (global menu) so you can quickly go there?

There's an issue for that[1]. :) Add your vote if interested.

[1](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/18054)

Please don't add too much stuff to the sidebar because of some isolated use cases.

Or maybe it might be a good idea to make the sidebar configurable so everyone can decide what they want to show up there.

What makes you say that? The difference between constructive criticism and a snide jab is the details

We actually do employ several UX designers at the moment (see https://about.gitlab.com/team).

Thanks for pointing that out. Though there's a difference between UX and UI. Would be nice to see some UIs on that list too.

You could spike their creativity with this simple command:

sudo echo "127.0.0.1 github.com" >> /etc/hosts

I think you mean:

echo "127.0.0.1 github.com" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts > /dev/null

I'm actually pretty fond of their design so far...

Thanks! Couldn't have done it without our great community and team. How can we help to improve the design of GitLab?

The navigation bar on the left was much better then on the top. Most current displays are widescreen, so vertical space is more valuable then horizontal space. Unfortunately I can't easily find a "before" screenshot to make a fair comparison, but I feel that the current navigation menu wastes more space and looks worse then the previous one.

I think by hiring a team. It's time to get serious now. Because Github gets it: https://dribbble.com/github

We definitely understand the need for serious design. That's exactly why we've raised funding. Currently we have open roles for designer, content design, UX lead, UX researcher, etc. Please let us know if you have any referrals for design candidates.

https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/

Hiring arbitrarily is kind of weird. Having a UI team for the sake of it could be considered quite harmful because those designers can't ever be idle.

And in any event, a software such as gitlab doesn't need to be pretty, it needs to be usable, fast and bug-free.

(GitLab Core Team Member)

Our dribbble is relatively sparse at the moment, but we do have it: https://dribbble.com/gitlab

We have quite a good UI/UX team in my opinion, but there's a lot of surface area to cover. If there's anything specific you think could be improved upon feel free to open an issue. :)

If anything the bottleneck right now is with frontend developers being able to implement features/design improvements, not with designers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com