Fwd: REST APIs, and Tags

[Guy Pyrzak]

On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 9:35 AM, Gervase Markham <gerv at mozilla.org> wrote:

> On 15/02/10 19:02, Frédéric Buclin wrote:
> > You like to be out-of-topic. This doesn't even worth a reply from me.
>
> It was a serious question. The answer is "because it would be
> complicated and ugly", right? Then why can't we apply the same logic to
> the current UI? If we can make it simpler, we should do so. The install
> thread further down has turned up at least one person who looked at the
> default Bugzilla UI and got scared by the complexity. I'm sure there are
> more we don't hear about.
>
> Gerv,

I think all of us agree the UI is too complex as it stands and could
use improvement. Bug we've also done lots of small improvements. However,
we've found time and time again it's hard to find...

1. People willing to work on the UI.
2. Mozilla folks who are supportive of simplification of the UI
3. Designers willing to post constructive ideas about how to improve the
complex parts of the UI

I think any of these three things would be appreciated. I've posted on my
blog how we plan to simplify the advanced search page. The admin side is
VERY scary looking but I personally (as do many other bugzilla developers)
think the users UI should be simplified first so we've been focusing on the
edit, search and homepage UIs.

That being said, if ANYONE wants to post some mocks of ideas on how to
simplify the UI for the admin I'd be happy to look at them and consider
implementing them myself to make sure they get in there. The problem is many
people who post UI ideas are only thinking about how they use the tool
(which isn't a bad thing but that's why we usually don't
just implement their ideas directly) not how new users AND extreme experts
would use the tool which is what makes designing for Bugzilla challenging. I
myself am guilty of doing this and have slowly learned the right way to
approach doing these sorts of designs.

Anyway, when it comes to the UI needing usability improvement you're not
going to get any disagreements but instead you're going to get one clear
message.

"Give us mocks, give us people willing work collaboratively on improving
things. Give us people willing to think through the problems not just say
'but i like this one more' "

I've worked with the Mozilla folks about UI improvements here is the first
post that has been made a while ago :
http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/improving-bugzilla-people-bugs-search-and-planning/

And there have been at least 3 other talks with them, many of which focused
on making it easier for end users to change the bugzilla skin and add more
fancy webservices (which your restful service should help a lot with)

The problem is of course, we need more UI people to step up and contribute.
If you find or know people who want to do so, send them my way. I am
watching ALL UI bugs and LpSolit and MKanat  often request me to review UI
changes even if I'm not the one to review the perl etc.

Bugzilla moves slowly, no question, but when you see how few active
contributors there are (i took like a year and half long hiatus) you quickly
realize why. But we've been trying and we've been trying to invite others to
contribute. There isn't a large usability community in open source in
general and many that do exist are paid to do that by some company (most of
mozilla's design team are), i could explain why but basically it comes down
to designing a usable and pretty UI takes a LOT more work than writing a
feature and requires you to be in a different head space.

Anyway, if you want to continue saying "Bugzilla is ugly/unusable", feel
free, everyone else does.  But if you want to contribute to fixing the
problem, grab a copy of your favorite image editing software and start
drawing up how you think Bugzilla should work, post some blogs to
planet.mozilla, get some feed back, do it again until you start hearing
positive feedback. Then after you're done with all of that fun, file some
bugs :D

-Guy
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