SeriousUserInterfaceNiggles

Status: Discussion phase - modest urgency

I realize that "serious" and "niggles" are a bit contradictory - i guess i'm trying to leave open the mandate of this page to a wide variety of issues, all concerning the user interface. There certainly is a number of things that need improvement.

• It needs to be less cluttered in lots of places. We may be able to us TreeTagExposure to do some significant reductions, but this will no doubt be an ongoing issue (and one we have to be careful to avoid exacerbating with other developments!
• The email notifications format is too intimidating. It makes sense to have some of the clutter - but perhaps more needs to be put below the substance of the messages (the item text) - and we need to consider whether trackerisms like the issue emblem are too unfamiliar for comfort.
• Overview sorting - it should be possible to sort on important columns - both the builtin attributes like last-message date, and also tailored traits like urgency, category, whatever. And it really must be possible to change the order of issues, to show, eg, most recent first as well as least recent.
• It may sense for some workflow and presentation purposes to have some builtin traits that can't be changed - or much better, some way to designate the names of traits that serve particular purposes (urgency, due date, what else?), and the ordering of their values.
• People need other kinds of traits than enumerated string values - eg:
  • Integer ranges
  • Date (maybe date ranges?)
  • Serial numbers
  • What else?
• Stage History - it is useful to be able to see how an item has progressed through the various stages of it's life. I know that this information can be intimated from looking at the issue items, but that is a lot of hard work for most people, especially since the stage changes are mixed up with lots of "noise". -- StephenHarrison?
  • *klm July 7, 00 - Huh - actually, every issue has an "Issue History" tab, visible to supporters, which provides just that information! Not bad!-)
  • sph July 11, 00 - Agreed, the Issue History tab does show that information, but it is not really suitable for what I describe above, which is something clear and informative from a simple users point of view.

  promote/msgfromrole/etc is all rather confusing if you don't understand the tracker from a programming angle. Maybe reworking the Issue History view to be more friendly in the way it presents its data would be the solution.

• Simpler issues view - The view of issues is the focal point for Tracker use and as such it needs to be as clear and intuitive as possible. One way to achieve this is keep the information presented on this view as simple as possible. Generally there are only a few pieces of information which are of interest to a user at the agrogate, overview level. Obviously this list of attributes will vary between the different TrackerUserTypes. -- StephenHarrison?
• As far as the issue number in the subject line goes, I'm planning to use that in the EmailReception bit of the tracker, so I'd be sad if it went away. The only real alternative would be some sort of utter foulness in a reply-to address, but this would require magic configuration of a mail transport agent - sendmail and postfix could do it, but I don't want to think about the poor bugger behind Exchange. :) -- anthony
• The other thing to note about the tracker's main view is that it's too complex. There should be a short simple one-line-per-open-issue view that you can get to quickly. -- anthony
• The main view currently uses alternating background colors to visually separate adjacent rows. A more effective use would be to map some attribute or combination of attributes to different colors. The basic idea comes from both Roundup and Xen screenshots, and from principles established in Edward R. Tufte's books on visual displays of information. -- phansen
• Generally speaking, I see no reason why the user interface should clip things like the issue "title" to a fixed size. If the text is longer, clipping it makes it unreadable anyway, and in most cases the current clip size is far too small. The Roundup screenshot has examples of a much better way, IMHO. -- phansen

Owner: KenManheimer
Last major update: June 21, 2000