launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Matthew Revell <matthew.revell@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 8 December 2011 12:21, Richard Harding <rick.harding@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> If we keep with the idea of "information density" I can't help but feel
> like the way some of the data is presented wastes space. In this
> screenshot, for instance, there's a person icon, the description text
> "Assignee: " and then the name. This is true of a few other fields and I
> wonder if there's not a way to allow the user to hide that information for
> the sake of more meaningful content in front of their eyes. These are
> mostly the power users out there, and they can probably tell just by the
> contents that which data is there.

Right, I agree that information density is important and the feedback
we've had from people who deal with hundreds of bugs a day is that
they want to see many bugs on screen at one time; so number of bugs
displayed vertically is what they want. The fact that there's white
space to the side is annoying only because it means that data might
have been pushed onto a second line -- and so taken the space that
another bug entry could have -- when it could have been off to the
right.

> The other idea would be to try to give them back some sort of header row
> that can identify the columns at the top/bottom without forcing the extra
> content in the data rows themselves.

If we do that, we're committing the wide screen view to only every
have one line per entry. So, if you have a wide screen and you have
lots of data shown then columns with text will wrap heavily, which
defeats the purpose. Maybe that's the point, though: the user has a
choice over whether or not to select that additional data.

Note: I'm discussing this because it's interesting and because it
might give us ideas of how we evolve the display of bug listings in
future. I'm not setting a direction for what we should do with the
remaining week of the bug listings beta.

> I think the big thing is that they get no choice for the second row. Even
> if they select but number, reporter, and status, they get two lines of
> content while there's plenty of room to put that on one line. I don't think
> a realistic goal is to provide some view that puts everything on one line,
> but to give the user a chance of selecting their own most important data
> and getting it in a reasonably condensed view.

Right, that's the crux of the feedback from wide screen users: they
hate to see new data appear on a second line when there's still space
to be used off to the right.

I think this is a difficult design problem because we want to give
people lots of new data options, we also want every data type to show
in the same virtual column so that it's easy to scan a list and we
want to do both those things while retaining readability on small
screens and making sure that people with wider screens feel that their
screen space is being used efficiently.

So, what we're going to do is this: Huw is implementing his
widescreen3 mock-up, along with a media query that'll switch to that
layout should the person have a wide browser window. We're confident
we can get that in before the end of the beta.

We won't make everyone happy but we will be able to offer people more
data in bug listings than they've ever had, while for the first time
in Launchpad's history optimising the display of that data according
to the size of browser window the person is using.

I think we should take pride in this feature, even if we have had to
do some last minute changes to make sure that we are doing the best by
our stakeholders and other users.


-- 
Matthew Revell
Launchpad Product Manager
Canonical

https://launchpad.net/~matthew.revell