I led design for the comment edit history project, where we iteratively added the functionality to view the who, when, and what was edited in comment threads on Issues and Pull Requests.

Problem space

• I want to see the history of decisions in conversations
• I want to know why someone edited my or their own comment
• I want to see malicious edits made by maintainers, business vendors, organization owners, etc. Tackling this problem had buy-in from both the open source and enterprise sides.

Design shaping

Information I gathered with the team's PM to help shape the designs:

🚨 Personal security

If we’re exposing edit history, we NEED a way to remove edits with personal identifying information (PII), security tokens, passwords, etc.

It's common to accidentally push up copy+pasted API tokens, personal email addresses, etc. So it was necessary to make sure permanently deleting edits was possible.

📊 Comment-writing behavior

• 63% of comments are edited once
• 16% are edited twice
• Mean # of characters changed: ~2,100
• 95% of edits were made by comment author

<aside> 🧠 If we design for ~5 edits, that will cover ~91% of all comments. If we design for a diff less than 500 characters, that would cover 87% of comment edits. Lastly, because of the authorship data, malicious edits don’t need to drive too much of the design narrative.

</aside>

Design explorations

Displaying the comment edits

The flow and UI for actually viewing comment edit history.

Simple way of showing the entire list of edits in a modal