GoogleChrome / chromium-dashboard

Chrome Status Dashboard
https://www.chromestatus.com
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The "Feature type" field is user-hostile #4102

Open mfreed7 opened 1 month ago

mfreed7 commented 1 month ago

So the fact that the "feature type" field can never be changed is a fairly big deal. Three times (at least) now, I have used the wrong feature type, only to discover that later and have to recreate the entire entry, copy/paste by copy/paste.

I would recommend the following changes:

  1. Make feature type the very first thing you have to enter, before you're allowed to enter anything else. That includes the title of the entry. That should help notify folks that this step matters. Akin to when I created this bug - Github first asked me if I was reporting a bug or requesting a feature. There should be a giant red banner indicating that this selection can never be changed, so take some time and get it right.
  2. List, explicitly and in great detail, the consequences of each choice. For example, which choices will result in an "Intent to Ship" which requires 3 LGTMs to ship, vs a "PSA" which does not. For example, I have no idea what material differences I will encounter when selecting "New feature incubation" vs "Existing feature implementation". Are there any? If so, what? If not, why are these two separate choices?
  3. Rename "New feature incubation" and "Existing feature implementation" to better describe them. An "Existing feature implementation" is an oxymoron - if it already exists, why am I implementing it? I presume "existing" means "in a spec" somewhere, but that's not very clear.

As an illustrative example, I recently filed this entry as a "Web developer-facing change to existing code" because that was very precisely what it was. A developer-facing change to existing code. I did not realize that this option would not trigger the need for 3 LGTMs from the owners. I was therefore forced to copy/paste into a new entry.

@yoavweiss

jyasskin commented 1 month ago

https://github.com/GoogleChrome/chromium-dashboard/pull/4106 does (3) and part of (2). I'll try to send another PR for (1) on Monday.