Sinzui

I met with Vish at UDS-N to discuss encouraging contributions to the One Hundred Paper Cuts project. The issues he raised demonstrate that the page design is not meeting the requirements we set in the Launchpad 3.0 UI designs. You will see a common layout in Launchpad pages where a wide narrative block is above two blocks.

The narrative blocks on a project page (and any Launchpad page using the same layout) must explain what the you are seeing and why it exists. This information is entirely dependant on the project owner.  One Hundred Paper Cuts does this very well. I can read that the project chooses 100 small bugs that can be fixed to improve the common Ubuntu user experience. The project summary says everything in one sentence. The projects description elaborates and explains the value.

The left block below the narrative provides information about who works with the project, and where is the code for the project. Some projects have information about the organisation that the project belongs too. In the case of One Hundred Paper Cuts, the information about “where” is missing and there is no way for Vish to provide it. This project does not have code, it organises work to fix the code in other projects. This is a legitimate use case. Launchpad does not require projects to have source code, but it does not let project owners state what it does as an alternative. I do not know how to solve this.

I would like to tell contributors that this project is affiliated with Ubuntu and User Experience, but Launchpad does not have a concept of project affiliation or tags. I would like to see similar projects that I could contribute to. There are no plans to provide this feature, but we are discussing what needs to be done to fix project groups which has overlapping issues. We may have an opportunity to build this feature next year.

The right block under the narrative is intended to be a call to action. Every page that uses this layout should using this block to encourage users to contribute. For distro series, this block shows the packages that need upstream information. For projects, this should summarise the planned work and what needs to be done. I see a fragment of the series and milestone time line, but it does not tell me what is being done.  The milestones names are not informative. The name implies that the milestones are a sequence, but the 10 milestones are worked concurrently. One Hundred Paper Cuts uses feature-directed milestones. Launchpad supports this work pattern, but the time line does not describe it. Vish could rename the milestone to reveal the theme of the feature, eg rename maverick-round-10-sc-metadata to software-centre-metadata.

Fixing the name is easy, but the information about the work will still not appear on this page. The project index page used to show a summary of the active milestones. I have pondered adding the current milestone to the page so that contributors can see what they can do right now…but how do I show 10 concurrent milestones? Pages that work with milestones are prone to timeouts. I cannot consider restoring milestone information until we solve the long python computation times needs to summarise them.

We can fix some of issues that the project index page has in the next few months, but I think some larger feature and design work is needed to really make the page work for all projects.

While attending UDS-n, I was invited to two separate and contradictory conversations about Launchpad Answers.

Jorge Castro is considering Ask Ubuntu as the official Ubuntu service for managing user questions. It is a nice service. The question refining and member reputation features are compelling. I think there are two changes that need to happen to make this happen:

1. Launchpad should let project register an external support service. I already have plans do this this later this month. Projects will be able to specify the URL of a site or email address of a list where support can be found. The external service can be used with Launchpad Answers, or by itself. This will permit communities to register the service they are already using, or allow end-users to choose the service that meets their needs.
2. The Get help online page accessed by Ubuntu desktop applications must be updated to point users to the service the Ubuntu community chooses.

David Planella lead a discussion about internationalising Launchpad Answers. This is a feature we have long wanted to do, but it has never been a priority. This certainly can be done with the community’s help. While examining how users discover Launchpad Answers, we saw that the Get help online page accessed from Ubuntu desktop applications is a complete failure for non-English speaking users. The general steps to fix the non-English-speaker’s experience are:

1. Automate POT extraction for code and templates.
2. Add support to localise pages based on your preferred language or browser languages.
3. Mark the translatable messages in the page templates, and this may require restructuring the information.
4. Replace the ugly plural hacks in the view code–Zope markup does not support plurals.
5. Enable translations for the Launchpad project.

Both David’s and George’s intentions are contradictory. The Ubuntu community needs to make a final decision regarding the future of community support before we can proceed. Stack Exchange does not support localisation either, and they do not have plans to support it.  We often talk about replace karma, no one will argue a case to support it, but replacing it is not a priority. Launchpad has an incomplete feature called standing that is like reputation; I am consider removing it because I do not like to maintain unused code.