GitHub
Improving the Board View experience in GitHub Projects
TEAM
1 design mentor, 1 PM, dev team
ROLE
Product design intern
TOOLS
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OVERVIEW
100 million people use GitHub. Projects is its one-stop shop for organizing and tracking work. I made using Projects Boards faster and more flexible.
GROUNDING DESIGN DECISIONS
I first focused on understanding how different user groups experienced Boards.
Crowdsourced feature requests from public discussion threads
Identified recurring issues from support cases and user tickets
Gathered workflow insights from user interviews
MOST COMMON PAIN POINTS
Designed for engineers, Board View lacked the flexibility required by its growing non-developer audience.
1
Missing item descriptions (a legacy feature), forcing users to click into every card
2
No support for image previews, making visual workflows cumbersome
3
Overwhelming column density in large, complex, or shared boards
BRINGING ITEM DESCRIPTIONS BACK
User feedback analysis showed me that teams relied on item descriptions for quick context. To address this, I:
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
Validated the need for and added task list previews alongside item descriptions
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
Image previews helped visual workflows (e.g., marketing) but were clutter for technical teams who mostly dealt with text-based tasks. So I:
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 product teams without cluttering dev boards