On 01/29/2016 08:37 AM, Mike Conley wrote:
Since making the review requester feel crappy is not generally
considered good, most review requestees don't push back on MozReview
requests, even if they find it very frustrating to work with. I think
this dynamic is at the heart of a lot of the angst about MozReview:
people just feel put upon.
That's a good point. From my observations and interactions with the
MozReview team over the months, I believe a great deal of the initial
effort has been to lower the ramp for the requestors, as opposed to the
requestees. The fact that we're seeing so many review requests go
through MozReview might be a sign of success in terms of that work.
Anecdotal evidence, along with the sentiments in threads like this (and
elsewhere) suggests that it would now probably be worth shifting the
emphasis on lowering the ramp for the requestees.
Personally, I think the main issue is that people can't "get" the data
model by looking at the interface, at least not until using it for quite
a while. And that means that everyone is coming in with different
notions of what's going on, and complaining about the things that are
broken *in the context of what their misperceptions* of what is
happening or should be happening. In short, many of the complaints are
mistargeted, because people don't understand what the tool actually is.
And saying "just file specific bugs" isn't always right, because many
times the user wouldn't have run into the problem in the first place had
they better understood what was going on.
A random example: the last time I used MR, I wanted to change the
reviewer on one of the commits. But the reviewer wasn't editable, and I
didn't know why. The whole list of commits and reviewers was right there
on the page; why couldn't I edit them? What kind of authoritarian
overopinionated thing is this, anyway, that doesn't let me change my
reviewers after I initially select them? I made sure I was logged in, even.
The problem was that I was on the display for a particular commit
(probably the commit for which I wanted to change the reviewer, I'd
imagine.) The list of commits at the top is just a read-only summary of
what you're working on, presumably there to help you stay oriented or
something. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense for all of the *other*
commits' reviewers to be editable when you're in a single-commit view. I
mean, they could be. Or there could be a separate place in the UI where
you could change the reviewer for the current commit. Or just that one
commit's reviewer could be editable. I could file a bug requesting any
of those.
But that's wrong. The underlying problem is that the interface does not
convey the distinction between single-commit vs whole-review views. The
right fix is to remove, collapse, or reformat the top summary section to
deemphasize it and make it very very clear when you're looking at one
commit vs the overall thing. I did not realize that until much later,
when I was writing my earlier rant in this thread.
So, IMHO, you're going to get a lot of junk bugs with the current status
quo -- as in, you could implement the requests and things would be
incrementally better, but if the interface communicated what's going on
better then the bug filer wouldn't have gotten stuck in the first place.
Whatever workflow the filer was trying to follow might be slightly more
streamlined, but the benefit is less than what could be accomplished if
users were a little more on the same page [no pun intended].
I hope I'm not seen as beating on the MR team. Despite being a light
user, I have communicated a bunch of feedback and found them to be
responsive (and friendly). It helps that I find our current set of
bugzilla-based workflows to be archaic and arcane, and for MR to be the
right general structure for what would be better. But I'm going to
repeat my toplevel beefs with MR as it stands:
- tab abuse (people get lost and confused)
- the data model is nonobvious and difficult to discover (people get
lost and confused)
- needs to do better at facilitating communication between the author
and the reviewers
I can file bugs for these, but they're not directly actionable. I could
file actionable suggestions, but I would hope that people closer to MR
and/or are more UX-y than me would be able to accomplish these goals
better than I could[1].
Steve
[1] It turns out that I do have some UX background, but I suck at design
and prefer to practice my whining skills.
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