1050841 - Reduce the size of & lighten the treeherder navigation toolbars

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Tree Management :: Treeherder, defect, P3)

Description

[Ed Morley [:emorley]]

Broken out of Nick's email, so we don't forget it:

> One final thing: treeherder has two toolbars at the top that are
> visually very "heavy". Partly because of the dark colour, partly
> because they are thick, and partly because they contain a lot of empty
> space. I wonder if they could be made "lighter". Possibilities:
> 
> - Use a lighter colour.
> 
> - Use a little less space above and below the text.
> 
> - Merge the two toolbars. It looks like you could fit all those
> widgets into one... though it might be tight, depending on the screen
> width.
> 
> - Remove or shrink some of the widgets. I see you have a responsive
> design thing happening where some of the widgets disappear if you make
> the window sufficiently narrow. My login name and the big "logout"
> button seem like they don't add much value, and I see they disappear
> in narrow mode. I also don't know what the "jobs" widget does; it
> seems to have no effect, though I'm probably missing something.

Comment 1

[Jonathan French (:jfrench)]

An fyi there has been a significant investment(of my time :) ) over the past several months in our broader goal of aligning Mozmill Dashboard to the Treeherder color scheme - among other UI improvements to that dashboard. They are represented in this open but nearly-landed issue and related PR below. Any changes to Treeherder that impact its color palette, would have downstream impact on mozmill-dashboard and its daily users because we want them both to be aligned visually for ease of adoption, mozilla 'brand' recognition, and intuiting workflow.
https://github.com/mozilla/mozmill-dashboard/issues/111

Other than that I endorse any improvements described to Treeherder's top navbar which enforce consistent internal margins, consistent font sizes and cases, consistent chevrons for drop down menus, and other general tweaks alluded to in this bug. I also was planning to contribute a few changes in this area also when I get some time.

Comment 2

[Jonathan French (:jfrench)]

Quick update, the mozmill-dashboard color/ui update mentioned above has been landed and pushed to all of their dashboard instances. Jeads also mentioned this week in the weekly mtg - for historical reference the color scheme for Treeherder (and now Mozmill-dashboard) is derived from Mozilla Firefox Dev Tools - which uses the same color pairs.

Comment 3

[Jonathan French (:jfrench)]

(In reply to Jonathan French (:jfrench) from comment #1)
> Any changes to Treeherder that impact its color palette, would have
> downstream impact on mozmill-dashboard and its daily users because we want
> them both to be aligned visually for ease of adoption, mozilla 'brand'
> recognition, and intuiting workflow.

At some point down the road (wild guess 2016) mozmill-dashboard content may start to get transitioned to treeherder, and mozmill-dashboard eventually retired. So any downstream UI impact will no longer exist.

A side note, there is work underway by camd to potentially populate the main treeherder navbar with more content like quick access global filters. So this may consume some of the unused space.

Comment 4

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

(In reply to Jonathan French (:jfrench) from comment #3)
> At some point down the road (wild guess 2016) mozmill-dashboard content may
> start to get transitioned to treeherder, and mozmill-dashboard eventually
> retired. So any downstream UI impact will no longer exist.

Oh, I really don't want to wait that long! :) Once we have our Marionette tests running in our CI system we need a proper database for results. So treeherder integration will start as soon as possible. Also don't worry about any styling differences with us. We only grabbed some colors which are close to treeherder ones, but those should not be a blocker here.

Comment 5

[Ed Morley [:emorley]]

I think some small tweaks here will go a long way to making the overall Treeherder UI cleaner.

Comment 6

[Wes Kocher (:KWierso) (Not reading bugmail; email directly if needed)]

The toolbars don't seem to be very big, is there really any reducing we can do there without also reducing ease of use?

And how light should we go? Should we just wontfix this bug?

Comment 7

[Ed Morley [:emorley]]

I'm indifferent at this point.

There is likely cleanup we could do to the toolbar (eg combining the two ways of filtering, combining some display options under a submenu, moving the repo tab links to the top bar etc), but most probably want to happen in their own bug.

Comment 8

[Jonathan French (:jfrench)]

I agree. There's been a lot of tweaking and cleanup over the past two years to make the menu bars more compact and consistent, and new menus and tick widgets have appeared which occupy what was once empty space. We've gotten rid of the Logout button per the request. There's some mild dependency on the current navbar color, given the color choices for the circular chicklets, so I'm not sure how much lighter you could go in navbar color without having them lose contrast against the background. :)

Comment 9

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

Yeah, I don't know if things have changed or if I've just gotten used to it, but this isn't a big deal any more.