The navigation bar on the left was much better then on the top. Most current displays are widescreen, so vertical space is more valuable then horizontal space. Unfortunately I can't easily find a "before" screenshot to make a fair comparison, but I feel that the current navigation menu wastes more space and looks worse then the previous one.

We definitely understand the need for serious design. That's exactly why we've raised funding. Currently we have open roles for designer, content design, UX lead, UX researcher, etc. Please let us know if you have any referrals for design candidates.

https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/

Hiring arbitrarily is kind of weird. Having a UI team for the sake of it could be considered quite harmful because those designers can't ever be idle.

And in any event, a software such as gitlab doesn't need to be pretty, it needs to be usable, fast and bug-free.

(GitLab Core Team Member)

Our dribbble is relatively sparse at the moment, but we do have it: https://dribbble.com/gitlab

We have quite a good UI/UX team in my opinion, but there's a lot of surface area to cover. If there's anything specific you think could be improved upon feel free to open an issue. :)

If anything the bottleneck right now is with frontend developers being able to implement features/design improvements, not with designers.