UI module owner

[Dennis Melentyev]

В пн, 26/06/2006 в 11:27 +0100, Gervase Markham пишет:
> 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.
Well, it's mostly role-dependent. What about putting some role
schemes/UI/WorkFlow/etc in?

> > 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.
Yup.

> If you are going to do a survey, please try and separate out the views
> of coders, managers and QA people into separate pots.
Sure. Also there are customers. But I'm afraid I'd better will not offer
them a survey. At least w/o higher management permissions.

> >> - 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"?
It's more like "I'd like to specify also Open/closed flag, user and some
date-related stuff".
Yes, of cause it's doable via AdvSearch page. But each time you open it,
you have to re-read it twice or so to remember what all that controls
do.
It's not a surprise to miss the help link. It's invisible at the first
grasp.
Good alternative would be expandable panels like in show_bug with button
mentioned already here.

> 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?
It has too many controls and no place to concentrate the sight at.
Current layout offer more details moving from <hr> to <hr>, with
main/primary controls at the top of the page.
The biggest problem is: one have to pay too much attention. (And,
better, need internals understanding to some degree)

> > 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?
They are working with us on bugs related to their products/components.

> > 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?
No. Just not dump all the possible handles and buttons to one page.

> >>> 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.
I need to check it to comment further.

> >> - 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.
But that's not the reason to stop improving it marketing abilities. See
firefox for example. It IS being marketing. We don't need any
advertisement, but the first impression should not distract users. And
first impression is "Mama, what's that heap of pages is for?"

> 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?
I think so. Otherwise we loose at least developers.

> 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.
... but could develop faster.

> >>> 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.
Yes, but adapting workflow to corporate standards should be much easier
than it is now.
I think we could cover at least several cases. (Yes, this will require
more effort to collect them, implement, etc)

> >>> 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.
Unsorted, undocumented, stale... No. Bugzilla should be a product, not a
pile of scripts. With recent changes in code, it got much more potential
and it's probably the time to think about the next big step.