"Private PPA access" page says "View View View View View"

Bug #690608 reported by Matthew Paul Thomas
14
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Launchpad itself
Triaged
Low
Unassigned

Bug Description

<https://launchpad.net/people/+me/+archivesubscriptions> lists the private PPAs you have access to.

The table has three columns: "Archive", "Owner", and one with no heading.

The text in the "Archive" first column is not linked to anything. But the third column consists solely of "View" links. Because these links are nearly identical (differing only in crookedness) and on the far side of the screen from the archive name, it's a bit difficult to see whether you're following the correct link.

It's a useful heuristic that if you're repeating the same interface control several times in an interface, you have chosen the wrong kind of control. Here, instead of a headingless column containing "View" links, the names of the archives themselves could be linked.

Tags: lp-soyuz p3a ppa ui
Revision history for this message
Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote :
Curtis Hovey (sinzui)
affects: blueprint → soyuz
Changed in soyuz:
status: New → Triaged
importance: Undecided → Low
tags: added: pa ui
tags: added: p3a ppa
removed: pa
Revision history for this message
Bryce Harrington (bryce) wrote :

This causes some confusion for users after being granted access to a private PPA, it's not obvious from this page that they need to also opt-in to the grant before gaining access to the password.

In particular, if instead of clicking on 'View' for the private ppa tokens, they click on the Team that owns the private PPA and then from the team page go to the PPA's page, they will see under Technical Details an apt line for the private PPA which does not show the credentialed URL link, nor gives any indication that they need to confirm access. They then copy that apt line into their apt sources but then get an error

  "Failed to fetch ... 401 Unauthorized"

The following proposed UI design would address this problem, by adding 'Confirm' links in place of some of the 'View' links:

    https://help.launchpad.net/Packaging/InstallingFromAPrivatePPA

Further, to address the secondary issue of the missing credentials on the PPA page, it would be helpful if instead of displaying the Technical Details dropdown link, to instead display a link to the credentials confirmation page.

With those two changes I think the UX problem would be sorted.

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