On Mon, Jul 28, 2003 at 04:19:21PM +0100, Robin Green wrote: > 1) Do a usability study on bugzilla. What could be done to make it > more attractive to intermediate and non-technical users? You don't have to do a study, bugzilla has such an awful UI even the programmers get confused and waste lots of time with it. ;-) Of course, problem #1 is "too damn many fields" and everyone loves their field and will whine if you remove it. Voting is another field... Anyway, I think a total redesign of bugzilla so it even _tried_ to have a reasonable UI would be needed before it'd be worth doing user testing... and we have a giant legacy problem with migrating to something easier. On the topic of voting: two reasons it's bad: - it often asks users for implementation advice. what you want from users is root problems and goals; "it's too slow/confusing/hard to do foo," "I want to do bar" - rather than implementation "use package XYZ"/"change behavior in such-and-such way"/"put a button over here" Some bugs are root problems, but most aren't. Most are really implementation type of issues. So to me bugzilla should mostly be for technical types and developers to discuss the specific changes. - most bugs that get a lot of votes are just things that someone posted to a discussion board or blog or mailing list and said "spam them!!!!" - as a result, nobody takes the votes seriously. (happens even now, we get bugs with loads of "me too!<aol/>" comments.) When it comes down to it, developers are going to use their own judgment on bug priority. They already get an indication of how many people care about a bug because they get duplicate reports, private mail, IRC pestering, and so on. What I think would be far, far, far more useful than voting would be a bug triage team as Mozilla and GNOME have, so that the good bugs aren't lost in a sea of noise, and so severity and milestone fields are accurate. Right now developers have to do their own bug triage for the most part. Havoc
