my Bugzilla redesign 2¢

Bugzilla lately has been going through a bit of a redesign process. Guy Pyrzak has been leading the initiative and has been making some very useful observations and changes. For instance, he observed that one issue for users is that new users sometimes don’t know where to begin; the initial path to a common action like creating an account or filing a bug isn’t immediately clear. In the recent design iterations, the path for new users – both to file a bug and create a new account – is much more eminent.

As I see it, the main challenge of the Bugzilla page is to cater to both users that see the page a million times a day and new users who just want to file a bug. It may be worth noting that a user filing a bug for the first time might be angry as the result of that bug, and thus less willing to search through menus. I haven’t seen Bugzilla’s data, but I’m guessing that users tend to fall on one of these two sides – very new or very experienced – with less in the middle. So the problem is one of focus – giving the new user a clear path, but not patronizing experienced users.

So here’s my quick suggestion. I like very much Guy’s idea of showing common  actions prominently, and included those in the design below. Other than that, I tried to group relevant data (navigation at top, login info at side) so that possible tasks were separated a bit more clearly.

Note: This is a design for default Bugzilla, not Mozilla-specific Bugzilla. However, since I decided to do a followup post with design suggestions for Mozilla’s Bugzilla, I’m happy to hear feedback about that too.