Launchpad itself

Bug tracker UI changes

Asked by Uday Reddy

For about a week now, I see a new user interface in the main bug tracker page. I don't know if there was any announcement about it in any forum. I didn't find an announcement on the Launchpad project page.

The changes I see are:

1. The drop-down menu that allowed us to sort bugs by importance etc. was removed. I have to go to "Advanced search" now to get this functionality.

2. The importance and status fields are displayed in block letters with gaudy background colors, which I find rather distracting. (When we are searching for a specific bug report, we are trying to understand the *content*, not its importance or status.)

3. Each bug report entry occupies two lines in my web browser, whereas it used to occupy one line earlier. Given that the second line is made up mostly irrelevant stuff and distracting icons, it adds further distracting elements.

In summary, this was a seriously retrograde change, which makes it harder for me to do my job.

If such user interface changes are considered important by other users, does it not make sense to make them configurable so that people can choose whatever format strikes their fancy?

Cheers,
Uday Reddy
(Maintainer of ViewMail for Emacs)

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Aaron Bentley (abentley) said : 		#1

The change was announced on the Launchpad Blog:
http://blog.launchpad.net/general/custombuglistings

1. Sorting by importance, etc is provided in the toolbar directly above the bug listing, beside the gear icon.
3. If you customize your listings to show only Number, Importance and Status, the listings will take only one line

We never want to make users unhappy with our changes, but we cannot please everyone. We have done our best to ensure that our bug listings work well for most users by doing user testing and extensive beta testing.

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Uday Reddy (reddyuday) said : 		#2

Re 3, I *must* have bug listings that occupy a single line each. After removing all the extraneous clutter as you suggested, I still find that the listings occupy two lines each, because of the icons representing targeted milestones. If you can get rid of these icons, or find a place to put them on the first line, I can at least begin to tolerate the new format.

Re 1, sorting by importance etc. is provided only for the toolbar buttons that are selected in the gear. As we have discussed, selecting them adds clutter to the listings. So, that is not a workable solution. I would prefer if you can bring back the old sort-by drop-down menu.

The important thing is that the bug listing we are talking about is for *searching*. When you search, you get a lot of results, and you want to be able to quickly scan through the search results to the find one you want. The sort-order and other attributes like importance, status etc. can help one locate the desired search result. But they are auxiliary to the content. They are not the focus.

If you try to design one format that has to serve both the searching function and the ranked listing function, I don't see how you will succeed.

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Aaron Bentley (abentley) said : 		#3

This is not the right forum to ask for changes to functionality. Instead, you should file your concerns as bug reports, tagged "bug-columns". Some, or maybe all, of your concerns have already been filed. https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bugs?field.tag=bug-columns

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