958018 - QA Contact and Assignee fields are too close and easily confused

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Bugzilla :: User Interface, defect)

Description

[Panos Astithas (he/him) [:past] (please ni?)]

It looks like almost every developer mistakenly tries to assign a bug to himself, only to find out that he is now the designated QA Contact for the bug. It seems to me that these two fields would benefit from being farther apart in the form, say by moving the URL field in between, as their appearance and functionality is very similar.

I'm sure a UX person would have even better ideas, but this is such a common mistake in my experience by people who live in bugzilla every day that I think something ought to be done about it.

Comment 1

[David Lawrence [:dkl]]

We are actually aligned with the upstream on these particular UI elements so moving this bug there.

dkl

Comment 2

[Frédéric Buclin]

It's the first time I hear such a thing. Having the URL field between the QA contact and assignee field is a non-sense. Developers should rather learn that there are 2 distinct bug roles.

I don't think we should move them elsewhere upstream.

Comment 3

[Panos Astithas (he/him) [:past] (please ni?)]

It's surprising to me that you've never heard of people accidentally modifying the QA Contact field before, but then again I'd never used bugzilla so much (or observed others using it) before working at Mozilla.

Everyone is pretty clear on the use of these two input fields, in my experience, it's just that when you have a lot of bugs to modify (like when you are finished with a previous assignment and assign yourself to a bunch of new tasks) your finger can miss the right "take" link and click on the wrong one. This is something UI design has to wrestle with all the time: "are these adjacent UI controls used in a common task?", "are they easily distinguishable?", "are the hit targets overlapping (common in touch interfaces)?", and so on and so forth.

I'm not trying to deny that clicking on the wrong thing is user error, but it's a mistake that I've seen so many experienced users make (myself included), that it points to a deficiency in the UI design of the product. A few weeks ago we decided to move a button in a toolbar to a different place, because a significant percentage of users often misunderstood its function due to its proximity to unrelated UI elements. There was nothing wrong with the button per se (label, appearance were all fine), but the human mind can derive context and make correlations when there aren't any.

I agree that moving the URL in between the two fields doesn't seem like the best solution, but it's the best I can offer right now. I was hoping that the bugzilla team would have better ideas or better contacts to solicit ideas from, than poor old me.

Comment 4

[Andre Klapper]

(In reply to Panos Astithas [:past] from comment #3)
> your finger can miss the right "take" link and click on the wrong one.

Could users work around via custom CSS (display: none) to hide the "(take)" link for QA contact?