GitLab-sponsored Tufts University Human Factors/Engineering Psychology Capstone Course

At GitLab, we believe everyone can contribute. In that spirit, members of the UX Department can volunteer to sponsor a project for the Tufts University Human Factors Engineering/Engineering Psychology (BS) senior-level students to take on during the spring semester.

We engage, support, and recognize students during the capstone design experience. As an industry sponsor, GitLab works with the students to solve an existing problem that is relevant to both Tufts and our organization.

The Tufts Capstone is a great opportunity for GitLab Team Members looking to share their knowledge and learn from each other. Some of the benefits include:

• Improve your mentoring and coaching skills by working with students who are new to GitLab
• Improve your communication skills, specifically around the concepts we work with every day using clear language that simplifies complexity
• Get more experience with public presence by supporting the design and research community.

Capstone course overview

The program duration is 15 weeks. Students participate in groups of 4-5 to solve human factors problems or design challenges set by industry sponsors.

Throughout the semester, students will deliver professional-level work, including weekly reports and presentations (with peer review), article reviews, and sponsor meetings/reviews. User research methods and principles will be applied along with project management and planning. The outcome of this course includes students creating a final project video, poster, and presentation which will be presented to the class, department, and sponsors.

How the project works

Each year in the fall, the project lead recruits GitLab Team Member volunteers and solicits proposals for projects.

At the start of the spring semester (usually in January), the participating students vote on which proposal they would like to work on.

The volunteer team begins meeting weekly with the students once they have decided on a proposal. Weekly meetings continue throughout the spring semester (In 2025, the students’ spring semester is January 15, 2025 through May 9, 2025).

At the end of the semester, the students present their results to an internal audience at GitLab (which is open to the entire org). They also present their final project to their professor.

Following the end of the semester, the project lead solicits feedback from volunteers and students, documents the results of the project, and arranges for the following year’s project leadership.

How to volunteer

If you’re interested in volunteering for the Spring 2025 semester, you should complete the following by Monday, November 18th, 2024:

1. Reach out to your manager for awareness and to discuss how participation might impact your capacity.

2. Add yourself to the list of volunteers.

3. (Optional but highly encouraged!) Brainstorm projects that would be a good fit for the students.

Volunteer team composition

For best results, we are looking for 3-5 volunteers from GitLab’s UX team, at least 1 of whom is a Product Designer and 1 of whom is a UX Researcher.

Project proposals

Do you have a project that has been in the backlog for a while now? It could be a good one for the students to take on! In general, the best projects include:

• A loosely defined scope so that the students can bring their creativity. The instructor may suggest the students scope it down so they can complete it in the 4 month semester. For example, improving the GitLab CI/CD onboarding flow. This topic provides enough flexibility to go through the entire design process but also allows the students to scope it down to evaluate specific areas of the onboarding flow and target certain users.
• An opportunity to perform discovery research, design (prototype), and solution validation.
• Async-first approach.

Each project proposal should include a summary with:

• A title: A concise and catchy name for the project. This is one of the first things the students will see when choosing their project for the semester.
• Description: A summary of the problem, including a problem statement and general background about the concepts that would make sense to beginner, non-GitLab users.

You can propose project ideas for the Spring 2025 semester in the comments in our volunteer recruitment issue.

Project ideas

You can use this list of previous projects considered for the Tufts University capstone project to help you get started selecting a project or to help brainstorm ideas.

Project lead

The project lead for the Tufts University Capstone Course project is a rotating volunteer position. Ideally, the same individual should not run the project more than 1-2 years concurrently in order to share the professional development benefits and workload that the role entails.

Responsibilities and timeline

The project lead has various responsibilities before, during, and after the student project.

Before the project starts

In the lead up to the project start, the project lead should:

• Recruit GitLab Team Member volunteers, keeping in mind the ideal volunteer team composition.
• Solicit at least 2 project proposals from GitLab team members for students to vote on.
• Communicate with the Product team DRIs (Product Manager, Product Designer, UX Researcher) that own the feature area for each project proposal.
• Coordinate with the professor, Linda Borghesani (Linda.Borghesani@tufts.edu). She will arrange for the students to choose which proposal.

During the project

At the start of the project, the project lead should:

• Collaborate with Legal to have the students sign an NDA to follow the guidelines of our SAFE framework (🔒 internal only). Once the students select a project in January, it would be best to connect with @ktesh with the project start and end date, a short description of the project topic, and all of the students’ emails in order for the NDA to be officially issued.
• Create a designated subgroup and public project in the Tufts University Group to track the Capstone project progress. Encourage students to create GitLab accounts with their school emails and invite them as owners to the project. This can help them get familiar with how GitLab works and the problem they’ll be solving. This can also be the place where they access resources or materials they need to complete the project. Check out this project for inspiration.
• Create a Slack channel for daily communication with the students. Follow the Slack access request guidelines to include external users in a Slack channel. You can also use this access request issue as a reference.
• Write up a summary of the selected project proposal and link any resources that would be helpful for the students to look at to gain a better understanding of the concepts they’ll be learning. Check out this markdown file for inspiration.
• Schedule a weekly check-in meeting time for volunteers and students
• Create an agenda document for weekly check-ins so that the students know what to expect. Check out this agenda for inspiration.
• During the first meetings with the students, ask them what skills they are hoping to get out of the project. There are opportunities during the weekly check-ins to focus on those skills and teach the students how they are used in real-world scenarios. An example of this is explaining how to use design systems in Figma, including how to get the library in Figma, adding and editing components, and even making contributions to the Figma kit itself. Previous topics that students have asked about are listed in threads on this issue along with supporting materials.

While the project is in progress, the project lead should:

• Work with the student team to make sure they have access to the necessary resources (for example, Dovetail) and people (for example, experts or participants to interview). Work with your manager to give students the appropriate access to GitLab tools and projects.
• Hold stakeholder review sessions for larger deliverables, such as the discovery research proposal. These meetings should at least include the Product Manager, Product Designer, and UX Researcher of the product area the project focuses on. These can take place instead of a weekly sync or at a separate time depending on the team’s preference.
• Use issues in the project to track sponsor-assigned tasks, such as project prep and reviewing student deliverables.
• Record weekly check-ins and add them to the Tufts Capstone Project playlist on Unfiltered. This playlist is private, as some recordings will contain confidential information, such as reviews of confidential research or competitors.
• If the students and professor are interested, organize a final presentation for them in a GitLab-held Zoom meeting. Be sure to:
  • include the Product Department as attendees.
  • Add the event to the GitLab team meetings calendar by following these steps.
  • Post in #whats-happening-at-gitlab for extra transparency.

After the project is completed

After the project has been completed, the project lead should:

• Share a write-up of the students’ results in the GitLab UX Research project and the gitLab-org/gitlab project. Check out this research summary and feature proposal for inspiration.
• Coordinate with current and past volunteers to establish who the project lead will be for the following year.

Reach out to @gdoyle or @clavimoniere on Slack if you have questions. More information including FAQs can be found here.

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