IMPACT
Made Boards faster and more flexible for cross-functional and non-development teams
TOOLS
ROLE
Product design intern
TIMELINE
June 2023 (3 weeks)
TEAM
1 design mentor, 1 PM, dev team
CONTEXT
What is GitHub Projects?
THE CHALLENGE
Research and insights
To uncover needs across different user types, I:
Analyzed feedback from GitHub Discussions, user tickets, and internal user interviews
Identified a desire for faster, at-a-glance comprehension and less clicking
Balancing familiarity and flexibility
Missing item descriptions (a legacy feature), forcing users to click into every card
No support for image previews, making visual workflows cumbersome
Overwhelming column density in large, complex, or shared boards
ITEM DESCRIPTIONS
Why do teams want item descriptions?
Designed a preview layout that showed the first few lines of each item’s description
Worked with engineers to ensure that longer text was truncated gracefully
IMPACT
Reduced click-depth by surfacing key context on the card itself
Original Board card
Item description (task list preview)
No quick context available, just the title / tags
Poor scannability = workflow bottlenecks
Created a more visually informative and differentiated card layout
Reduced back-and-forth clicks
Provided narrative context
ADDING IMAGE PREVIEWS
A double-edged sword
Identified the divergent needs between dev and non-dev teams
Proposed a toggle setting for enabling / disabling previews
Designed card visuals that maintained hierarchy even with image content
IMPACT
Enabled richer workflows for design and product teams without cluttering dev boards
Customizing image previews: introducing description, image, and task list previews and the ability to toggle them
Understand what a card is about at a glance without needing to click in
Can quickly scan a board's contents
Users still have to click into a card to see all of its details. Is there a way to view content without leaving the current page?
An important factor is speed
Users wanted faster access to common actions, and wanted all information without having to click away from the main Board view. To address this, I:
Prioritized expand/collapse as a quick action, making it immediately accessible
Original Board card
An expandable board card via a caret in the top right corner
Full details were buried so required modal or page navigation
Poor scannability led to workflow bottlenecks, especially on large boards
Surfaced more info inline, on demand
Let users scan or deep-dive without leaving the board
A NEW OPPORTUNITY?
Packing more power into the Board, without the bloat
Testing revealed a deeper user behavior: users ignored entire columns when boards became dense or shared across teams, but didn't want to hide them completely.
I reframed the opportunity: this wasn’t just about visibility, it was about board manageability. So, I:
Designed two interactions: (1) collapse to hide column details, (2) compress to shrink cards for dense boards
Pushed for both as quick actions, minimizing friction in fast-paced workflows
Pitched both views as a step toward better triage workflows, enabling boards to scale with complexity
IMPACT
Allowed users to triage boards more efficiently and customize their workspace
Pitching different column views: collapsed and compressed
TAKEAWAYS
A few new North Star design principles for my toolkit
Don't just listen… watch
User interviews told me what people said they wanted, but it was up to me to uncover what they actually needed.
Pitching the "next step" matters
Framing features in a larger workflow narrative helped secure buy-in and push ideas forward.
A balancing act
The most flexible tools are those that feel simple…until you need more. Designing for that balance was key.
A big THANK YOU! to my mentors Jannes Peters, Manuel Solera, and Matt Pence, and to my intern cohort :)
