FogBugz gets Fresh
November 18th, 2011 by Dan Ostlund
We think the FogBugz interface is getting a little long in the tooth. The problem is that we’ve been working on features and speed and, and, and…
There is always something that feels more pressing. Always some technical debt to pay down. Always a bug in some super wonky edge case, But It’s Happening To A Very Important Customer, and needs to get fixed. In short, we always can find a very reasonable and important reason to put off the design changes that pretty much everyone here wants to make.
But as everyone who has been near the internet or heard of Steve Jobs will tell you, design is just as important as features—possibly more so in some cases. In the same way that we’ve come to regard our website as a product, we also know that design is a feature that deserves equal billing with more pedestrian features. It’s not that we didn’t know this—we’ve always cared a great deal about it, and in fact, Joel wrote a book about it—it’s just that we haven’t had the time or the resources to devote to it in some time.
Tastes change. Technologies change. Sometimes even established practices and affordances change. It’s entirely possible to build up what we might call design debt in the same way that software can accumulate technical debt. And FogBugz has some design debt to pay down at this point. It’s time to scrape some of the mold off the bread.
But design changes are tricky. They alienate power users. If things are mysteriously moved you have to be sent to a Microsoft re-education camp (to learn where all of your commonly used administration tools absconded to…again). You’re just as likely to make things worse as you are to make them better, especially if you’re doing a lot of guessing about what people want and how they behave with your software.
So this weekend we’re rolling out some design changes to FogBugz. We’ve tried to balance updating the look without requiring the cumbersome re-training camps. There are some very subtle changes on the gridview page but these are mainly making menu items a bit bigger, making fonts more consistent, and some color changes. You probably won’t even notice these changes.
The more interesting changes are on the case view page.
Here is a pic of the current (soon to be old) case view.
Here is a pic of the new case view.
There were a couple of things we tried to do. First, we just wanted to make it look a bit fresher and more modern, so we changed the icons, using some of the icons from the very beautiful Fugue Icon Pack.
Next, we felt it was important to make certain kinds of information stand out better. You might occasionally want to know when a case was assigned to someone, but more often the content of the case is much more important. Given that, we de-emphasized the information around administrative minutiae and tried to make the comments of a case more apparent.
If you send an email or have a case that comes in via email (in other words, the case has a correspondent), you’ll notice a nice little air mail bar along the top of that portion of the case. That makes it clear that you are dealing with or sending an email and distinguishes it from some other normal case edit. You’ll never accidentally send an email from FogBugz again. This one deserves a little more comment. At the risk of indiscreetly tooting our own trumpet, I’ll say that this was one of those occasional moments of perfect design inspiration. I didn’t even know it was going to be there, but the first time I saw it I understood instantly what it meant. Without the need for a text label, or an explanation, or some other heavy-handed means the function is totally clear. It’s an “I could have had a V-8” moment. Seems so obvious after the fact.
Cases have always contained status information, but you had to read text to know what it was. That’s OK, but we wondered if it would be better to give a visual cue so that this information could be absorbed at a glance. Now the status of a case is given a color in addition to the text. Green is active, blue is resolved, and gray is closed.
We’ve also done some odds and ends with color and more consistent font choices and the like.
Overall we’re pretty pleased with the balance we struck between freshness on one hand and consistency on the other.
We were able to do this because we moved a talented support tech over to the design team, and he made these changes over the course of a couple of weeks. But, alas, the commute was making life with his new child hard to manage and he left Fog Creek. Everyone on the FogBugz team was thrilled to have him, and we’re committed to making more changes to the FogBugz interface to make it more modern and responsive and generally more pleasing.
So this post ends with a request. If you’re a good designer, or know one who wants to work at a great software company in New York City, please send them our way. Check the Fog Creek careers page for the job posting.
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