Cold start to PR in four hours · Designshippers

Cold start to PR in four hours

Into someone else's production repo, their conventions, their reviewers, and a real problem taken all the way to a pull request. One afternoon on OpenReplay.

View the pull request ↗

Design usually stops at the handoff. A Figma file, a spec, a hope that what ships resembles what was drawn. We wanted to test the other version: go into someone else's production repo (cold), their conventions, their reviewers, and take a real problem all the way to a pull request.

One afternoon on OpenReplay, an open source session replay tool. 11k+ commits, no prior exposure, no access to the team.

The problem

A new account starts recording sessions the moment the tracker is installed. Open Dashboards and you get an empty box and a Create button. Create one and you get an empty grid asking what you'd like to visualise. Pick a card, configure it, save, repeat.

Meanwhile the product already ships seventeen card types that need no configuration at all and run on data that already exists.

So at the exact moment a team is deciding whether the tool works, it has the answers and asks a question instead.

Drag the handle. What a new account landed on, against what shipped to review.

The call we got wrong

First pass made a session count chart the hero, with sessions underneath. Wrong. Nobody opens a session replay tool to watch a line go down. The sessions are the product.

Reordered around what people actually come for: sessions needing attention and high level numbers to communicate signal across all sessions.

What shipped to review

The dashboard opens directly instead of behind a list. Core metrics on the left, each one filtering the session list beside it rather than sending you elsewhere. Sessions take the larger share of the page. New dashboards fill themselves.

One constraint shaped the design: the API won't tell you which sessions contain errors in the list response, so those counts run as separate filtered queries. That's the kind of thing you only find from inside the code, and it affected how we designed the layout.

No new dependencies, no new colours, no custom components. In this particular case, we used the existing design system and kept the visual constraints strict.

Repositoryopenreplay/openreplay

Pull request#4811

Files changed10

Lines+581 / −29

PR

Open, not merged. A clearer hierarchy, not a beautiful redesign.

We focussed on identifying a real problem during the onboarding journey and design engineered a solution within the existing codebase and design system. All the way to (open) PR, in hours.

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