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UI Matters

The talented Rick Olson and Justin Palmer have just launched an issue tracking application called Lighthouse. If you haven’t checked it out you have to right now.

Here’s why lighthouse is going to cream every other bugtracker out there - because they care about UI. What projects like Bugzilla are missing is that if your bug system has a horrible UI, people are not going to be happy using it. And when you are not happy, you tend to avoid. And when you avoid, less bugs are entered. Bugs end up on your hard drive in text files instead of on the system where they belong.

Lighthouse is different. Not only have they put thought into their UI but they’ve realized that people need to be encouraged, not discouraged from entering bugs. So they’ve got submit-bugs-by-email integration and an API that would allow you to enter bugs in any way you wish.

Bugzilla is an outdated system that is dying a very very slow death. The Bugzilla team continues to do a tremendous job to try to bring it up to speed with modern bug tracking systems, but instead of focusing on the frontend they put a lot of effort into the backend. Here’s my hint to you guys: the first thing people see is the frontend. That’s what sells, not your laundry list of features (which by the way most modern systems have anyway).

Bugzilla may be flexible as hell but in that flexibility it loses all the things that “make sense” like why can’t I have a stragihtforward milestone view? Instead I have to go and create a custom report from your 50 custom fields just to get a view of milestones? Newsflash: milestones are a central part of a tracking system. Make them front and center, not one of your 50 custom fields…

Lighthouse’s philosophy can be seen very well in its UI. You don’t get 50 custom fields that are usually irrelevant to your bug. You get just the basics, title, description. Do you need more? There are tags! Easy right? If you want to talk about anything special just use tags to do it instead of cluttering the screen with a bunch of fields. That makes reporting easy too. And since lighthouse recognizes that things like milestones are important they are always visible with nice green bars to guide you to completion. Simply, it makes me want to use the bugsystem to see where I’m at. Every time I open Bugzilla, otoh, I am in a sea of confusion and I want to run away as quickly as possible.

Rant over. Sorry :-)

If you were heavily using issue tracking systems, you would know you cannot do everything with tags.

“Bugzilla is an outdated system that is dying a very very slow death.”

Nice to hear? And how do you come to this conclusion?

You see ranting means I state my feelings and not necessarily facts. Maybe it was just wishful thinking :-) I am not going to put down the work that the bugzilla guys do. Certainly they’ve built one hell of a complex beast of a system, and in Perl to boot (and the code isn’t actually as ugly as one woudl imagine). My hat’s off there. But at this point it is _so_ behind the times that they should start from scratch (at least on the UI standpoint).

You know that pretty much every company out there has modified their bugzilla to one extent or another. The reason for all these hacks is because the UI is terrible. It suffers from the too many options too little focus syndrome. Bugzilla needs to tighten down on features and UI in order to survive against lighter competitors.

Btw Fred, I am a heavy user of bugtracking systems. I’ve used about 5 different ones and event built my own in a previous life. In my mind none of them is perfect, I just pick on bugzilla because out of all the rest of them it just has a nasty UI that needs a complete overhaul. If I wasn’t a heavy user I wouldn’t be complaining so loudly. See also my other post on my ‘ideal bugracker’: http://skwpspace.com/2007/01/03/bugtracking-in-the-new-millenium-how-to-build-a-better-mouseerrbug-trap/

For the record, the backend code is getting better and better every day. This was mostly required to now make the UI better (compare the code between e.g. Bugzilla 2.16 and 3.0).
About companies customizing their own copy of Bugzilla, they do it to implement some additional specific features, not because the UI is “ugly”. Their UI remains mostly the same, but with features that are too specific to their needs to be implemented upstream. I really don’t think Bugzilla has too many features/options.

Can someone answer me this basic question - why do I have to click on the bug # in bugzilla to open the bug? That is the smallest click target in the whole list. Why isn’t at least the title of the bug hyperlinked? This is a 5 second patch…either someone is too lazy or this illustrates how out of touch bugzilla is with usability issues. This is something so basic and simple it’s hard for me to understand why it hasn’t been addressed….and that’s just the beginning.

If you don’t think bugzilla has too many features let’s look at this super-duper-any-dimensional-multi-searchable-bells-and-whistles reporting page: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/query.cgi?format=report-table

And yet there is no simple view of milestones. This is the case where flexibility has won over usability and it’s not a very pretty sight.

Re: the search form. If this form is too complex for you, use the simple search form at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/query.cgi?format=specific

Also, if it only requires 5 seconds of your time, you could as well write the patch yourself and submit it on https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/

Finally, note that the complexity of the search form has nothing to do with the number of features implemented in Bugzilla.

Yan, I stumbled upon your blog today. I usually don’t get into other’s blogs with blunt promotion of our product, but your article is so emotional that I can’t resist — so please excuse me, just delete the comment if you find it spammy.

I’m the founder of ALM Works, a company that created Deskzilla — a desktop client for Bugzilla. Have you taken a look at it? Our motivation was a lot like your thoughts here, and I hope that we improved Bugzilla UI a bit. Bugzilla is still a very good system for specific purposes, for example for hosting zillions of bugs. Arguably Bugzilla is the most widely used issue tracker, which also gives it a credit. It has also unique features which I didn’t see in other trackers — flags/requests and mind-boggling (if not mind-cracking) group access rules.

As a side note, I believe that professional issue tracker should not be a web application. (With all due respect to the web 2.0 technologies, which sometimes look like reinventing the wheel.) It is convenient to have web-based interface so you can track issues anywhere, but most of the times we use tracker from our workstation, as well as IDE or e-mail client.

So Lighthouse may be an interesting thing (thanks for the link!), just like FogBugz, which was also positioned as UI-centric. Maybe we’ll create a desktop client for all of them some day.

@Fred

If I had a bit more time I would definitely do that but I am involved in too many things right now to dedicate time to a project I think is fundamentally flawed. I prefer to start with aproduct that has the right philosophy if I\’m going to contribute anything. Now that may make me sound like an asshole but with so many competing bugtrackers out there, why should I even consider bugzilla today except that management has been sold on it.

@Igor.

First don\’t apologize for promoting yourself. You have every right and even responsibility to reach out to passionate users. I am actually using Deskzilla in trial mode right now. It is a world above Bugzilla, thank you for your efforts in giving bugzilla a palatable interface. That said, it still needs a lot of work and some of it is in pricing. I can see $99 when your boss pays for it, but on a personal level, it does not give me $100 of relief from my bugzilla pains. You see Deskzilla is \’nice\’ but it is not a product I can fall in love with, be passionate about, or evangelize. For a good example of that - see TextMate. Friendly, extendable, nice UI. This is a product that you want to evangelize and a license costs less than deskzilla. THe second problem with Deskzilla is that it is java based which means the UI isn\’t quite where it can be if it were for example nativized to Cocoa (I use a Mac). Now if you were to offer Deskzilla native Cocoa for $25/ a license and build some nice extendability into it like the ability to really change things, you might be able to build yourself a nice passionate userbase.

But I can see that the point of Deskzilla is probably to sell more corporate licenses, which makes sense, because I don\’t really know anyone who would use bugzilla for personal projects or small company usage. Lighthouse supports email submissions so the fact that it\’s on the web is a convenience not a hindrance. I also think your bugs should be accessible from anywhere on the net otherwise the point gets lost (you are not always at your workstation at work when reporting a bug).

By the way I hope you\’re not comparing lighthouse to fogbugz, which has a terrible UI (at least 6 months ago when I used it). Desktop clients are very nice when they feel nice. That means you need some nativization please :-)

Yan, thank you for your comment and I’m glad that you did take a look at our app. I totally agree that Deskzilla needs a lot of work, and native look and feel is Java’s weak point even on Windows — more so on Mac. But we’re not finished developing yet :) Actually our project is more than Deskzilla, Deskzilla was just the first product; and I hope we’ll soon bring to the world a good (if not innovative) UI for whatever-tracking.

Sadly, it takes more time than we’d thought it would. (That’s one of the top N things developers say :) )

I also can see what you mean about pricing. I hope that with the release of Deskzilla 1.3 things will get a little better for personal users, as we are going to offer $65 personal licenses. It’s not $25 yet, and it still doesn’t look like a native Mac app (though it is more Mac-friendly than the previous version). But I’d rather make our products more appealing with features and great UI than with the price. :)

@Igor

Good to know you are working on improving the system. I can see myself paying $65 if it was for a truly awesome UI that I couldn’t live without :-)

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