launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Jonathan Lange <jml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 8:52 PM, Tom Berger<tom.berger@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> One of the bugs application pages we're going to redesign for the 3.0
> release is the bugs index page (bugs.l.n/project). The current page is
> hard to use and not focused enough.
>
> The goals for the new design are:
>
> 1. Serve as the main entry point for bug searches.
> 2. Serve as the main entry point for filing new bugs.
> 3. Provide easy-to-use links to common predefined searches.
> 4. Provide an overview of the bugs in the project.
>

These are great goals :)

> The most interesting changes proposed are:
>
> * All action links are grouped together in the top-right part of the page.

Other than "Report a bug" and "Ask a question", are there any other actions?

>  * The link for reporting new bugs will eventually raise an inline UI
> so that the user doesn't have to navigate to a new page.

That's nice.

Martin Pool once (twice, three times -- it comes up a lot :))
suggested that the simple search for a bug and the "report a bug"
interfaces should be collapsed into one.

As a bug reporter, I quite like the idea, since it saves me the work
of first searching and then filing. It also seems to fit nicely into
our existing bug reporting UI.

> * All predefined search links are below, on the right-hand part of the page.

Cool!

Will you show links for things that have zero results? I ask because I
think, for example, that having 57 bugs fixed elsewhere is one of the
single most exciting things that can happen for a project. But having
0 bugs fixed elsewhere is pretty boring.

I can imagine similar use cases for CVE bugs, incomplete bugs etc.

> * The list of tags is now presented as a tag 'cloud'. The size of tags
> will be determined by their relative prominence in the project, with
> official tags factored to appear more prominent.

This sounds good too. There are some pitfalls to avoid though.

When we did the branch tag cloud, we got a lot of complaints that the
various axes of display weren't clear. We tried to visualize too much,
and this made the cloud less useful. Even after we've simplified it, I
still get people asking me questions about "What does size mean?",
"What does the color mean?" when I show them.

Also, it would be really nice if after this was done, there was some
code in lp.services.tagcloud, rather than some tag-cloud code in
lp.bugs.

> * Advanced search options will be accessible from within the page
> itself, so that the user can initiate complex searches without
> navigating to a new page.

I love this. So much that it hurts.

Are there plans to tweak the advanced search UI? At the moment it is a
bit bewildering, and I often find myself pining for Trac's query
interface.

> * The pie chart is gone. It seems nobody is going to miss it.
>  * Eventually, we'd like to provide a chart of the status of bugs over
> time, but that's not going to be possible for 3.0 because we don't yet
> collect this data.

I still would like to try unrolling the pie chart into a thin,
horizontal, clickable bar. But only as an experiment.

> * The lists of bugs in the project are combined into one standard bug
> listing with 'top bugs'.
>

As Martin Pool suggests in an email below, the heading doesn't seem to
be pulling its weight.

> See mockup attached. Comments and suggestions appreciated.
>

Thanks,
jml