Re: New GNOME2 bug submission page- still needs a lot of love :)

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

Luis Villa wrote:

> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/simple-bug-guide.cgi
>
> This is where we want to be pointing newbies at to file bugzilla bugs.
> It needs a lot of love, but I'm ready to give it some love for the next
> few days.
>
> *bug people: any usability/layout/quality suggestions, go for it :)

In general, all the pages are too wide, even when I make my browser
window square (and I prefer a portrait-shaped window) it still shows
horizontal scrollbars, and horizontal scrolling is yucky :)  Especially
as scrolling reveals that there isn't actually any content lurking off
the edge in some cases.

A few other quick observations:

As somebody noted earlier, the list of applications doesn't appear at
all in NS4.x, and the "press this button once you're done" cell is
completely black apart from the "Next Page" button.  The following
comments apply to my using it with Mozilla 1.0 on Solaris 8:

No indication of what I've done wrong if I don't select an application
before pressing "Next Page", it just bounces me back to the same page
with no explanation.

Again, the second page is way wider than it needs to be-- this time it's
more annoying because half the list in Step 3 is chopped off.

Ditto for Step 4, half the button is chopped off.

"List of recently reported bugs"-- might be nicer if these opened in a
separate browser window so the user didn't have to keep finding their
way back to this page (but if you do this, make sure the popup doesn't
directly overlay the existing window, so the user knows what's happened
and doesn't wonder why their Back button has suddenly stopped working).

All the images need ALT text, including the big numbered circles.  (It
would be better if these weren't graphics at all, though, that way the
user who needs high/low contrast text wouldn't be disadvantaged by your
choice of colour...)

Step 6:  Don't use "here" as a link, this tells nothing to people using
screenreaders that just read out the link text.  Text in this case could
be something like "Look here for <guidance on categorising the
severity>" or similar, where the text in brackets represents the link.  

Again, would be useful if the severity descriptions page opened in a
small popup window so people can refer to it while entering their bug
reports.

"Dos and Donts" should almost certainly be "Do's and Dont's"...

Step 8: "Which operating system"-- I guess this should default to the OS
you're currently running on, like the current bugzilla form does.

The list of bugs when you select "my bugs" is nastily formatted-- the
most important column (Summary) is given the least amount of space, and
"Owner" seems to take up half the page.  Never noticed this happening in
NS4.7x, guess it must be a Mozilla thing.

I'm sure the docs guys will have some suggestions on tightening
up/de-jargoning/de-colloquialising some of the wording as well :) 
Cc'ing the ones here to see if they have any suggestions.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems