Doomed Reports?

[Christian Robottom Reis]

On Mon, Oct 25, 2004 at 12:18:41AM +0100, Gervase Markham wrote:
> Christian Robottom Reis wrote:
> >Fair enough. But this means you *do* agree we need a number of pre-set
> >searches put together in the Reports page to allow people to actually
> >discover this kind of feature exists, right? 
> 
> I'm not quite sure what you are getting at. Which page, exactly? And how 
>  can one make it more obvious that this feature exists than a big link 
> to it on the report summary page, with an explanation of what it does?

What I'm saying is that we had a one-click (well, few-clicks) way to get
a list of bug counts per engineer. Today we need to use an interface
which is more than a bit scary, guessing in the process what magical
incantations are to be pronounced to obtain this result. 

I believe that most of the complexity in this task, however, is
inherent, and apart from offering a step-based wizard to generate these
reports, the only option I see to remove the initial barrier the UI
presents is adding some links to common queries to report.cgi (that can
also act as a gentle way to show off the really cool reporting we have
to the end-user). My suggestion is therefore to remodel "Reporting and
Charting Kitchen" into something that is more inductive -- suggesting
concrete tasks the user can do instead of offering an array of options
that can be confusingly similar (Old Charts? New Charts? Reports? What's
the difference?). I think we've got a formidable reporting solution, but
I suspect few people know it exists, and less actually manage to use it.

Take care,
--
Christian Robottom Reis | http://async.com.br/~kiko/ | [+55 16] 3361 2331