"Special" Bugzilla meeting on Thursday, June 22, 2006 at

[Benton, Kevin]

> Our next Bugzilla meeting will be special in at least two ways:
> 
> 1) First of all, we won't meet on Tuesday as we used to do, but on
> *Thursday, June 22, 2006*, at 16:00 GMT (09:00 PDT, 18:00 CET). Be
> careful that that's 2 hours earlier than usual (but two days later, I
> know). The reason is that justdave cannot attend on Tuesday. As he is
> the project leader, it makes sense to have him at the meeting. That's
> why. :)

East coasters (US) will have to join at 6 AM?

> 2) Secondly, we will have a special guest who will attend on Thursday:
> Mike Beltzner (aka beltzner on IRC), the UI lead for the Mozilla
> Corporation. Quoting himself:
> 
> " "Phenomenologist" ;) but yeah, UI Lead for MoCo works. Generally
> provide UI/UX guidance to all mozilla products and projects, heavy focus
> on Firefox obviously, but my fingers are in many, many pies"
> 
> As we are thinking about how to improve the UI for Bugzilla 3.0 (besides
> implementing AJAX and gandalf's work), we decided to ask someone who has
> a great experience in this area. Another advantage is that Mike will
> have a different look at Bugzilla than we, developers, have. Maybe
> Bugzilla 2.22 will be the last release where people could complain that
> the UI was hard to use for common users and that features were hard to
> discover.
> 
> No matter what will be discussed and decided, we will need as much
> feedback as possible. So please attend if you can and if you are
> interested (or already involved in UI stuff). We will meet in the
> #bugzilla-meeting channel, as usual.
> 
> 
> See you on June 22,
> 
> Frédéric Buclin (LpSolit)

Just in case I can't make it...

Let me say this before someone lops my head off for making these suggestions:  I know that a lot of very good work has gone into the UI improvements proposed for 3.0, especially by Gandalf.  My hat's off to you, Gandalf for being 1) brave enough to handle the comments that came, 2) for taking the time and putting in the effort to create something that could become leading-edge for web-based UI's regardless of the application, and 3) sharing your ideas with us.  Having said that...

I suggest that whomever works on the 3.0 Bugzilla UI be very familiar with the books - "Web Pages That Suck" and (or at least) "Son of Web Pages That Suck."  I'm sure everyone here would agree that Bugzilla doesn't suck right now, but we could certainly introduce things that could make life difficult for novice users.  When I first looked at the pages Gandalf did, I saw many very cool features, but what I didn't see was instruction on how to use the page.  I didn't know I could move frames around till I tried it.  Most users won't try moving frames and will therefore, miss out on that feature.  Granted, it was just a demo, but I want to make sure we don't miss that point before distributing it as part of our UI.

I also think we could do better at letting the browser handle some of the input validation for the user (not for Bugzilla, though).  That way, users who try to navigate away from our form without saving changes will get prompted, preventing data loss.  Users who supply invalid keywords will get a pop-up asking them to re-enter, and users can get warned if they attempt to set a flag to + or - without (where appropriate) going through ? first (as some examples).

I say, "not for Bugzilla, though" because we need to validate input coming to Bugzilla no matter where the data comes from, a browser, a script, or a cracker.

---
Kevin Benton
Perl/Bugzilla Developer/Administrator, Perforce SCM Administrator
AMD - ECSD Software Validation and Tools
 
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