The most polarizing thing about DEV is its design. As the person most responsible for our design as it stands today, I'm pretty much in agreement with all the different perspectives. We have made some good choices in creating a fairly usable interface with character, but by and large we have been a pretty amateur effort; Forever holding out for help.

We have had visual design help through the open source community as well as with @arakodesigner and her project-mates Rachel and David, who stayed on for a stint with us after we volunteered as their guinea pigs (through a UX course at General Assembly two years ago). However, by and large, we have not been able to muster up the resources for dedicated design leadership within our organization, until now.

Today marks the first full day for @lisasy as part of the DEV team. She has worked with us for the past month or so to help us map out our future plans in this arena, which will likely include at least one additional product design hire. Additionally, and in a fun coincidence, @peter and I worked with Lisa many years ago — before she went on to work with thoughtbot, Facebook and Dropbox.

DEV + Product Design 👋🏼

Lisa Sy (she/her) ・ Dec 9 '19

#meta #design #ux

Nobody embodies the term "generalist" more than myself. On any given day you'll find me collaborating on our low-level site reliability concerns, working with our frontend team, our marketing, support, or anything in-between. I am, however, a total amateur at most of these tasks. I also find myself lacking the time to provide deep guidance on any of it. So, just as our community can breath a huge sigh or relief that we now lean on @molly_struve to lead up our site reliability, our users will soon see the benefits of experienced leadership in our product/design.

Lisa has expressed a deep appreciation for collaboration with users in order to make the right design choices. As an open source and community-driven company, we'll be giving her the reins to do just that.

Just as we hope that our engineering choices will provide the basis for an ecosystem bigger than DEV, we look forward to the propagation of our design choices. We are not an organization that can truly be described as "engineering-driven", or "marketing-driven", or "design-driven", etc. We strive to give appropriate weight and credit to each discipline required to serve our community. Today, we add some much-needed balance to the structure of our product team.

We hope you all give Lisa a warm welcome!

Happy coding (and designing) ❤️