UI module owner

[Gervase Markham]

Dennis Melentyev wrote:
> Some controls are definitely "Advanced". 

- For whom are they "definitely Advanced"? One person's advanced control
may be another's most important.

> Will try to collect opinions of
> our developers on this. (Idea! Need to add a usability survey link to
> useful-links! :)

Of course, this survey will not necessarily shed light on the views of
all of Bugzilla's focal personas. I guess it depends what sort of people
you have working for you.

If you are going to do a survey, please try and separate out the views
of coders, managers and QA people into separate pots.

>> - Does anyone actually do complicated searches, or are 100% of Bugzilla
>>   searches merely searches on Subject?
>> - If we don't have a page with all the controls on somewhere, how are
>>   people going to be able to do those complicated searches?
> I have to do a lot of reports and even more, I can't do some searches, so I had to hack a page for some special ones (not usable for others and definitely lacks security).
> But, basic search is too minimalistic, while advanced is over-bloated
> for freshmens. 

Why is basic search "too minimalistic"? And for whom? I assume you don't
mean "because it doesn't have enough widgets"; so do you mean "because
it doesn't find what you want some of the time"?

If so, an alternative solution would be to consider looking at ways to
improve the quality of the search results returned by the basic search.
That would benefit everyone.

>>> It's getting intuitive when you getting more and more familiar with
>>> Bugzilla process, but is a complete mess for a newbie.
>> So we ask:
>>
>> - Is that page supposed to be used by newbies?
> No. But they do often need somewhat advanced, but not over-helming
> pages.

What evidence do you have that people who have graduated from the simple
search form (and therefore already have some familiarity with Bugzilla)
still find the complicated one hard to understand?

> Another user role is "Customer The Great" often under-qualified to
> fill-out all controls, not patient and not willing to learn this "ugly
> pages". But their reports are gold for us.

Why are you pointing your customers at the advanced search page? What do
you expect them to accomplish there?

> Yes, It is already customizable, but this increase the cost of
> ownership. 

So Bugzilla needs to ship with versions of the search page to meet every
possible need from every company which uses it?

>>> IMO the best idea is to have a wizard-like search and bug entry pages,
>>> with ability to switch back to current pages when "the wizard" will
>>> start abuse you.
>> What, like the guided bug entry page we already have? :-)
> Which one? bugzilla.mozilla.org? Kind of... But in distrib. (I could
> miss recent 1-2 month changes at tip)

We do distribute it, and have for years. It's create-guided.html.tmpl.

>> - Which of our personas cares about sexiness/coolness?
>>
>> (If the answer is "none", it doesn't mean we can't make it look more
>> sexy. It just means that it's not a high priority.)
> Yeah, It isn't high priority task. But Bugzilla as a product suffer from
> that.
> Just try to imagine it a commercial product with just price cut down to
> zero.

But Bugzilla is not a proprietary product with a price of zero. If it
was, most of us wouldn't be working on it.

Let's turn the question on its head: is one of the goals of the Bugzilla
project to get as many companies and organisations using it as possible?

As this is a value judgement, personal opinions are allowed :-) I
personally don't think that should be a particularly high priority goal.
Clearly, it's not good to have only a few places using it - but we are
well past that stage.

>>> Yet another idea is to have several default (pre-shipped?) skins
>>> selectable by USER in his profile:
>> This clearly has a maintenance cost, so we ask:
>>
>> - Which persona needs this feature, and why?
> Every company it uses. Because of TCO and general attractiveness (Is
> there such a word in English? :).

Re-skinning an application (in the usual sense of the word "skin" - i.e.
changing colours and logos) has no effect on TCO.

>>> 1. Just current (classic) skin
>>> 2. Sexy-dumb-n-bullet-proof-wizardry (anyway, we definitely need one for
>>> collecting bug reports from customers, who could not always be smart!)
>> We already have customisation mechanisms for this sort of thing; and
>> it's not called a "skin".
> We just need a samples bundled in distro.

They are.

Gerv