Closed Bug 528871 Opened 16 years ago Closed 16 years ago

Small bugs crawling across screen while searching

Categories

(bugzilla.mozilla.org :: General, defect)

Product:
bugzilla.mozilla.org
Component:
General
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
normal

Tracking

()

Status:
RESOLVED FIXED

People

(Reporter: faaborg, Assigned: justdave)

References

Details

Attachments

(2 files)

Screen shot of the interface being discussed
30.13 KB, image/png
Details
New bugs.js
9.46 KB, application/javascript
Details
In the upgrade to Bugzilla 3.4.3 the search visual feedback page (which previously consisted of solely an animated dinosaur) picked up a larger number of small bugs that animate across the user's screen. This creates a negative user experience in that it provides a needless visual distraction not directly related to feedback, interrupts the user's cognitive flow, and more fundamentally taps on the user's primitive and instinctual dislike for petulance (bugs == (something died | feces) == brain triggers small amount of fear in order to stay alive/healthy). While this is a common trick to draw attention to unsavory graphical Web advertisements (maggots crawling through the user's screen onto the page, etc), this type of chicanery doesn't necessarily belong in a product that is used by Mozilla's contributors for many hours each day. recommend user experience: remove both the dinosaur and the bugs and replace them with a large water mark style throbber in the center of the page to indicate feedback of the results being generated.
Depends on: 438362
Chompy amused me for about a month after he was new; the ants annoyed me before my first query completed.
I fully support spraying the ants with Raid(tm).
er, pestilence. perhaps petulant pestilence.
Oh, come on :-) It's a game. The ants follow your mouse cursor, but if they catch it, they disappear and are randomly-placed again. You can play the Pied Piper of Hamelin, leading them around the screen. It's something to do while you wait for your query - like mirrors in lift lobbies. And they are ants, not flies - no faecal connotations here. Gerv
My vote to use something closer to upstream UI, i.e. with ants going away. There are hundreds of games for your OS, if you want to play.
Where can I request blocking-tomorrow? Here's a user style for the meantime: http://userstyles.org/styles/22597
Someone framed this in the newsgroups as a UX thing. I think that's exactly what it is. It improves the UX, for several reasons. 1) Sitting there staring at nothing is boring. At least for me, I'm more likely to go and do something else, like read some feeds, while waiting for a complicated query to load. This breaks my flow. Keeping people's attention actually improves their productivity. 2) Bugzilla feels faster if you have something to do while waiting, just as lifts arrive faster if there are mirrors in the lobbies. Gerv
If we're looking for a compromise, can we at least not show it for quick queries? I get the whole corny game idea, even if I think it's not worth the effort, but if it's just a flash of crawly bugs for a second or so then it's not much of a game.
If we knew how long the queries were going to take, we'd display a timer countdown instead :-) Gerv
Then just wait 5 second before kicking it in.
Sure, we could do that. No problem - it kicks in on a timer anyway, because the load event doesn't fire on multipart/x-mixed-replace. Gerv
Or have a preference so that those who never want to see it can hide it (or maybe even just have an "ants game" link that popups a frame so you can play whilst you wait).
I have to admit, I'm also in favor of the ants going away, as clever as they may be implementation-wise.
justdave: can you change the timeout value to kick off the ants (last line of the JS file) from 200 to 5000? Gerv
OMG. I purposely ran huge queries just to play with the ants! :)
By the way, why ants? Shouldn't they be those little green bugs, like in the favicon? That'd fit the theme better. Maybe even let you move Chompy around with the mouse to eat them. :) Of course, in general, this thing is really beginning to bug me. +1 for Raid.
I rather like the ants (right now, anyway), but I'm not sure they quite fit... perhaps increasing the delay would help things considerably. (I discovered them earlier when Bugzilla crashed during a search -- I had plenty of time to explore the detailed behavior of the ants :-). Crash has since been fixed.)
(In reply to comment #8) I don't think anyone's arguing that UI feedback is good while performing a query. I think people are arguing that *this* UI feedback is horrible, distracting, and for all the reasons in comment 0, should be removed. Please can we remove this? As someone who runs dozens or more queries a day (many of them long and many which time out), it's driving me crazy.
We just had a discussion near the JS pit about this topic and I wanted to take the opportunity to express just how annoying this particular feature is. I am all for UI feedback, but I don't think the ants are in any way linked to the server-side progress (which would be useful feedback), nor do I think that even in that case this would be a meaningful method to provide feedback. Add a counter or a progress bar or whatever you like, but please do remove the ants. If people are very attached to the game/animation aspect, maybe we can add an opt-in preferences setting to enable them?
+1 for Raid, extra strength. When you kill the any this your mouse, it just comes back!! Very annoying. Kills my eyes.
Attached file New bugs.js —
Dave, can you please drop in this updated bugs.js? It sets the start time to 5 seconds, and makes each bug disappear when it catches the cursor (you can always click to add more if you like). People should also note that the bugs stop on mouseout. If you want them to stop moving, just do that. Andreas: if we had a way of providing meaningful progress, we'd do that :-) This is not a substitute for a progress indicator, the idea is that leading the little critters around the screen kills a few seconds while waiting for a buglist to load. Gerv
Attachment #413571 - Flags: review?(justdave)
Assignee: nobody → justdave
modified skins/custom/bugs.js Committed revision 6716. Should be live in a couple hours.
(In reply to comment #23) > Should be live in a couple hours. OK, should be live now. Your browser probably caches the js, so you'll probably have to shift-refresh to pick up the change.
I adblocked https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/skins/custom/bugs.js immediately after my 2nd query with the flies. This does require overriding the general @@mozilla.org whitelist.
Gerv, how about a link that shows up when the bugs do for "never show me the crawling bugs while I wait for search results" or somesuch that sets a cookie when you click it? That'd fix it really quick for the people who hate it. :)
I've been here at the All Hands meeting this week and no-one has accosted me about this problem. One person said it was OK. Is it the case that the 5-second delay, the change to kill rather than respawn, and a few people's use of adblock has resolved the issue? Or is there continued unhappiness? Gerv
Well, I'm not a hand so I'm not at all-hands, but I'd like to complain about them. Initially I never saw them, but now I'm seeing them all the time, running the same queries returning (roughly) the same number of bugs--has Bugzilla gotten slower this week?--and all the little roaches running around really make me ill (especially at lunchtime). I think we should default to no-bugs and let people who need to be distracted while long queries run opt-in to additional entertainment.
I see them less, now, but I am sorry to say that I feel similarly to Smokey about them when I do. I think insects are just not wonderfully likable to many people (which is one of the reasons we got rid of the big ant on the front page).
I am at the all-hands. I didn't know we are collecting votes. Please put me down in the "eww, bugs are gross, how annoying" column as well.
We've gone out of our way to develop a culture that hates "me too," so don't be surprised if it's difficult to poll us without polling us. Even if all MoCo employees knew it was a bmo customization, knew that it could be turned off, knew that you had the power to turn it off, knew who you were, and were a representative sample of bmo users (zero for five there), without actually saying "I'm taking a poll" I'd expect it to be fairly rare for people to seek you out and say that they are tired of seeing bugs crawling around.
Gerv, let me know what conference room you're in. I have a box of live bugs to accost you with. :-) In addition to what Phil wrote, I think a lot of people just throw their hands up in despair -- due to the long history of Bugzilla upgrades introducing disliked features, and the frustrating amount of effort it takes to get them addressed.
Fair enough. Dave: can you back the patch out, please? Gerv
It's backed out, but I'm having trouble deploying it... it seems the RHEL 5.3 -> 5.4 upgrade we did on the cluster staging server picked up a newer version of bzr with is more strict with SSL certificates, and the cert doesn't match. Haven't figured out how to override it yet so it'll let me pull from the repo.
Blocks: 534773
I finally got bzr working yesterday, but forgot to come back and close this. It's deployed.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 16 years ago
Resolution: --- → FIXED
Attachment #413571 - Flags: review?(justdave)
Component: Bugzilla: Other b.m.o Issues → General
Product: mozilla.org → bugzilla.mozilla.org
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