launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Deryck Hodge <deryck.hodge@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 9:49 PM, Huw Wilkins <huw.wilkins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> Let's talk about the bug start page for projects. I'm talking about pages
> like this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad
>
> At the moment we display the top 10 hottest bugs. There is no pagination or
> ordering controls. What do we gain by showing this listing? I'm not sure we
> gain that much. We get a small snapshot of bug activity, we don't overload
> the user with too many bugs that the user might not care about. Do we gain
> anything else?
>
> What if instead of limiting the bugs we show a normal bug list? With the
> work the Orange team have done that list will have customisable bug
> attributes, it will be orderable and of course paginated. I think this is a
> great replacement for the snapshot of hot bugs we have now.
>
> The question is, do we retain bug heat as the default order or is there
> something better? The options are:
>  - Bug number (in practice this is essentially the same thing as bug age)
>  - Title (alphabetised list of bugs)
>  - Importance (good for showing bugs that often should be worked on first)
>  - Status (good for showing bugs that are new or need triaging, depending on
> which status we listed first)
>  - Bug heat (good for showing bugs that have recent activity or whatever it
> is that bug heat actually signifies)
>
> Helmets on, bikeshedders, which do you think?
>

Hi, Huw.

Like others, I would favor removing the hot bugs teaser list for a
standard bug list like any search returns.  i.e.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad would be exactly like
https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bugs.  In the absence of any
real data or user research to answer the default ordering question,
I'd favor sticking with the current default of reverse importance.  I
don't hear a lot, if any, complaints about this default.

As to the larger question of why a hot bugs list in the first place,
this was changed when heat was introduced.  It was meant to give heat
more visibility.  There was the hope from some that heat would be a
nice indicator of activity and interesting bugs.  It was limited to 10
because of this tension between users and developers using this page,
and a belief that people really are going to search bugs by default.
So it was just as much an attempt to make search more prominent as it
was to show hot bugs.

I agree with others who think displaying bugs by heat in this way is
misleading.  I also think our use and display of heat across Launchpad
should be evaluated at some point, but that's outside the scope of our
current work.

Cheers,
deryck

-- 
Deryck Hodge
https://launchpad.net/~deryck
http://www.devurandom.org/