Iterating our design workflow keywords in trac

The Design Team provides user experience, user interface, and visual design expertise for the WordPress project.

Want to get involved?

Welcome! This all-volunteer team needs designers of various kinds. See our handbook and drop into #design once signed up for volunteer opportunities.

Our vision is to be the go-to resource for design for other teams across the WordPress open source project.

In the design weekly meeting a few weeks ago, discussion happened about how to align keywords in trac (core and meta) and labels from Gutenberg GitHub for design.

Why make changes?

Currently there are a wide range of keywords across meta and core trac for design, along with a lack of consistency. This also sees ui and ux feedback split, which often sees a confusion over what to use when.

The goal of this is to unify the workflow and making it easier for designers to follow and contribute. As triage is a focus for 2019, this also should make it easier for anyone work ing on that.

Suggested changes

The proposal being put forward is to distill down to 2 keywords across both tracs and this aligns with current GitHub use:

‘Needs design feedback’: ‘ux-feedback’ and ‘ui-feedback’ will now merge into this one keyword.
‘Needs design’: this will be specific to require a design.

What do you think? Please leave a comment to discuss this change.

Joy 7:56 pm on December 17, 2018

They sound like the same thing to me.
Mel Choyce 8:59 pm on December 17, 2018

This makes sense to me, but I’d love to hear more from +make.wordpress.org/core on if this change makes sense to developers triaging trac as well.
- Jb Audras 9:20 pm on December 17, 2018
  
  Sounds nice to me 👍
- Joe McGill 9:25 pm on December 17, 2018
  These changes make sense to me and my interpretation would be:
  - Needs design feedback: A designer should review and give feedback on the proposed change.
  - Needs design: A designer should create a prototype of how this should look/behave before writing code.
  - Sergey Biryukov 12:34 am on December 18, 2018
    
    Makes sense to me as well 🙂
  - Jonathan Desrosiers 5:56 pm on December 19, 2018
    
    I agree with @joemcgill. These sound great to me, and I share his interpretations. I often struggle knowing whether to assign UI vs. UX, so I think combining the two would be very helpful.
    
    Worth noting, the handbook has a Trac Workflow Keywords page that is missing the `needs-design` keyword, and `ui-feedback`, `ux-feedback` are described in the same line. We should make sure this gets updated when these changes are rolled out.
    
    Thinking about the new Triage Team, I would love to have at least one designer on that team. Having more uniform keywords will help tickets get proper attention when evaluating whether to close or explore a ticket further.