Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 74356
Poor usability of website when reporting bugs
Last modified: 2017-05-20 09:42:48 UTC
This is about website usability. I find the location of your bug tracker within the OpenOffice.org website *very obtuse*. Can I suggest you do a quick five-person poll a la Nielson to observe how hard people find it to locate the bug tracker? I think that you will find that people not experienced with the Open Office website will have quite some difficulty locating where to go. Emphasis should be on making a simple, intuitive bug search and reporting tool, rather than burying links and passing people through hoops. Obviously you want to reduce duplicate reports. Having a confusing system *reduces* the chance that people will be able determine whether or not they are reporting a duplicate. FWIW I think that the GNOME website is the model for user-friendly bug reporting: gnome.org --> support --> report a bug --> simple bug assistant cf openoffice.org: openoffice.org --> support --> ???? openoffice.org --> contributing --> quality assurance (QA) --> QA website --> report bugs --> how to start --> ??????? openoffice.org --> contributing --> quality assurance (QA) --> QA website --> report bugs --> issuetracker Is it 'report bugs' or 'report issues', or is it 'quality assurance' (or is it QA?). And why would I care about all that guff on the 'how to start' page? And why do you assume on the 'support' page that I can't possibly be seeking support for a bug that I've found? A user should NOT have to go through a QA website to report a bug! QA is a back office activity, not a front-desk thing! The bug reporting page should focus 100% on the person reporting the bug, not on the team that manages the bugs. Finally, perhaps there is some philosophy or other behind the 'issue' versus 'bug' choice of terms (ie QA people know that reported bugs are often not bugs but just silly users like me) but how about calling a spade a spade, eh? And the user point of view is that they are experiencing a bug -- so they will be looking to *report a bug*, not *be a person with an issue*. And the user is always right, isn't he? :-)
Agreed - constructing Bug Tracker query is very painful.
Changing platform and OS to All. Adding cc.
On http://qa.openoffice.org/ooQAReloaded/ooQA-ReportBugs.html can "IssueTracker" be changed to "Submit new bug/issue". This is catching me out, and I'm fairly experienced in the ooo project. The phrase "IssueTracker" does not mean "Submit new bug/issue", which is what I'm looking for. My eye is sitting there scanning the page for "Submit new" and cannot find it.
The ooQAReloaded page is a problem, sure, but really the problem goes all the way back to the "Support" page. There should be clear links saying where to go if you find a bug. To me it feels as though some corporates heads have decided that OpenOffice "doesn't have any bugs that our real users will find" and that therefore the bug tracker should be obfuscated. OpenOffice can afford to be open about the fact that it has bugs and that people are working on them. It's a feature :-)
Dupe of 55306 or the other way around :-)
Reset QA Contact to new default
I would rather direct people to the users mailing list unless they have a consistently reproducible bug; however, once you open the bug tracker, searching for duplicates can be frustrating, as the search engine often returns 100+ results, most of which are irrelevant.
Luckily, the results that are automatically displayed in the new bug entry screen are much more relevant.
Currently the Support item in AOO Help directs users to http://www.openoffice.org/support/index.html which should direct users to the forum and mailing lists as a first preference. Given the creation date of this issue and many changes since then, I am closing this as Resolved and we will continue to improve the Bug Tracking landing page -- http://www.openoffice.org/qa/issue_handling/pre_submission.html