1125264 - [Meta] Reduce the visual complexity/learning curve of the Treeherder UI

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Tree Management :: Treeherder, defect, P4)

Description

[Ed Morley [:emorley]]

Many of the feedback comments from the recent TBPL transition survey mentioned that they felt the Treeherder UI was overly complex/cluttered, with features that they didn't use or were hard to discover. (And I agree with a fair few of them fwiw).

I think this is a combination of:
* Use of (sometimes unclear) icons for many features, whereas TBPL mainly used text.
* Addition of more features than TBPL:
  - unavoidable, but perhaps we can have advanced vs basic modes, or do a better job of tucking them away.
  - alternatively perhaps this is a discoverability thing: if people new those 'annoying buttons' actual meant they could now do foo in half the time, they might be happy to see them there).
* More parts of the UI being visible as-is, compared to TBPL - ie: TBPL used rollovers to hide features - which wasn't great for discoverability, but reduced the perceived business of the UI.
* Some of the colour/layout/border choices + possibly unfinished/changed designs. eg:
  - The status counts on the header row for each push are quite in-your-face since they have neon borders/backgrounds of the same colour as the failure type. However the original intention was for this background to only be set when the failure was not yet classified - but I think we must have forgotten to implement this.
  - The toolbars at the top of the UI are very clunky - but that's mainly because originally we intended to make more use of the tabs, with multi-repo in a window support. We could slim them down more now.
* Lack of full help/documentation:
  - Docs can get out of date really fast, so I'd prefer something like an in-app overlay that explains the various features (even something as simple as showing the contents of all the existing button/toolbar tooltips next to their respective elements).

There's always going to be some OMG change with replacing something as widely used as TBPL (and there have been people who like parts of the new look as well, but they aren't going to have commented on the survey) - but we can definitely improve on this first iteration of the UI.

Comment 1

[Ed Morley [:emorley]]

s/new/knew/ haha

Comment 2

[Ed Morley [:emorley]]

(In reply to Ed Morley [:edmorley] from comment #0)
> * Some of the colour/layout/border choices + possibly unfinished/changed
> designs. eg:
>   - The status counts on the header row for each push are quite in-your-face
> since they have neon borders/backgrounds of the same colour as the failure
> type. However the original intention was for this background to only be set
> when the failure was not yet classified - but I think we must have forgotten
> to implement this.

This is fixed by one of the commits in:
https://github.com/mozilla/treeherder-ui/pull/354/commits