People not linked on bug listing

[Jonathan Lange]

When you have "Reporter" or "Assignee" enabled on a customized bug listing, you can see the reporter and assignee, but you cannot click on them to see information about them (perhaps all bugs on that project that are assigned to them, say).

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Several bug reports for the bug-columns UI suggest click functionality for various elements. If clicking is added (and I agree it should), it should be done consistently on all elements.

There are three types of click behaviors one might expect:

  a) New search across all bugs matching this element (e.g. as suggested by this bug)

  b) Narrow the existing search by this element (e.g. suggested on bug #894726)

  c) Edit the element

  d) Sort listing by this element

I suspect (b) would be the best approach. It is similar to how other sites (e.g. newegg.com and amazon.com) behave. It makes the bug metadata much more valuable to add and maintain, and essentially exposes functionality currently only available through the Advanced Search page. That would help inexperienced LP users by enabling advanced search functionality available in a more discoverable way, and helps experienced LP users by giving a faster workflow for drilling down into search results.

I imagine (a) would be easier to implement, and still useful in some situations, but I don't think it would add nearly as much utility.

(c) and (d) I do not think are good ideas.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Oh, and:

  e) Display additional info about the element (e.g. alluded to in bug #894738)

If the information is relatively static (like a text description), a popup bubble activated on hover-over might be the least intrusive way of doing this.

[Matthew Revell (matthew.revell)]

Thanks for that analysis Bryce.

Clicking an item to narrow the scope of the existing search is an interesting idea.

It's out of scope for this project, though. It'd be part of a future "Improve advanced bug search" project and Aaron's rough estimate is that we're looking at a minimum of a week's work.

We could do it cheaply, I suppose: if someone is shown as the reporter of a bug, click their name and it opens a new tab with all the bugs they've reported. I'm not sure how useful that'd be. The one thing I want to know, when seeing someone's name in a bug listing, is who they are.

So, we can do some research into what people want from links on those milestone, person and other names in listings and make that a longer-term aim.

In the short-term, we can easily link those names (person/team, milestone, project/package) so that it opens the relevant overview page.

I'm leaving this bug as "Low" while we work out how we might want to fix it.