I agree with Steven. We're spread thin right now so it's not trivial to switch focus (everyone on the design team already does multiple context-switches per week). Doing occasional reviews and providing input in our spare time will probably work, but I don't expect a focused design queue cleanup to be viable without sacrificing work on editor engagement, etc.


On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 11:05 AM, Steven Walling <swalling@wikimedia.org> wrote:

On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 10:55 AM, Quim Gil <qgil@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Thinking of this email and the "lack of time" answers...

Would it make sense to have periodical UX sprints where we would focus on certain item(s) at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User_experience_review_queue

Those sprints would be scheduled ahead and would be planned and promoted as group activities involving the developers of the features reviewed, members of this list and anybody else interested.

A bit in the style of
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/QA/Weekly_goals

but starting with one sprint per month.

This could raise the attention (and the fun) around this queue and our design related activities in general.

This sounds suspiciously like LevelUp or 20% time for design work.

To be blunt: things get left behind because that's how prioritization works. I think designers et al. should lend a hand to design review of items like Commons gadgets when and if they have spare time, but if they don't, it's a consequence of the fact that more important work is taking our focus. 

In my view, the healthier solution is not to try and grab more time from paid design staff with schedule UX sprints, but to recruit volunteer designers. 

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