A couple of non-romantic justifications/reasons for ya :-)
* It may well have taken substantially less time than you think. Once an organisation has a structure in place for how the UX of a web app should run, and infrastructure in place for making sure things are coded up to that standard (standard templates, test suites, process, etc.) then these things can go together very quickly. I don't know how github runs it's UX/design side - but they seem like the sort of folk who'd streamline the heck out of the process.
* Wearing my UX hat - most of what you see isn't hard. It's basically having decent typography choices, decent vertical rhythm, good visual hierarchy. The icons look off-the-shelf from somewhere. This stuff doesn't actually cost any more time to do right the first time if you already know what you're doing (just like good DBAs automatically write normalised schema).
* With something like this - which is a mode switch between the "nice" stuff that your customers see and the stuff that you see as a developer - it's easier to keep everything nice rather than make the context-switch in development between nice/nasty.
* Wearing my ux-speaking-to-developers hat - think of it like technical debt. Yeah - maybe you could throw something together quickly that would do the job. But if you leave it in it has a knock on effect with everything you do next. It makes tweaking and extending stuff in the future more difficult. Keeping the UI clean, like keeping the code clean, may cost a little more up-front but will save you time in anything but the short term.
* Good UIs are more effective. Making the tools that the internal folk use to make the site better more effective seems like a good choice to be making.
* It may well have taken substantially less time than you think. Once an organisation has a structure in place for how the UX of a web app should run, and infrastructure in place for making sure things are coded up to that standard (standard templates, test suites, process, etc.) then these things can go together very quickly. I don't know how github runs it's UX/design side - but they seem like the sort of folk who'd streamline the heck out of the process.
* Wearing my UX hat - most of what you see isn't hard. It's basically having decent typography choices, decent vertical rhythm, good visual hierarchy. The icons look off-the-shelf from somewhere. This stuff doesn't actually cost any more time to do right the first time if you already know what you're doing (just like good DBAs automatically write normalised schema).
* With something like this - which is a mode switch between the "nice" stuff that your customers see and the stuff that you see as a developer - it's easier to keep everything nice rather than make the context-switch in development between nice/nasty.
* Wearing my ux-speaking-to-developers hat - think of it like technical debt. Yeah - maybe you could throw something together quickly that would do the job. But if you leave it in it has a knock on effect with everything you do next. It makes tweaking and extending stuff in the future more difficult. Keeping the UI clean, like keeping the code clean, may cost a little more up-front but will save you time in anything but the short term.
* Good UIs are more effective. Making the tools that the internal folk use to make the site better more effective seems like a good choice to be making.