9 ms·

Interesting - why do you think they should be removed? I purposely kept them because they felt a very positive part of the Jenkins personality.

by i386 10y ago

jupp0r 10y ago
Just a matter of personal taste, they don't deliver the fast visual clues to me that simple red and green elements do in other CI systems like bamboo. From a distance, they look quite similar and that fails to give me a quick overview. From my experience, they are a very polarizing piece of UI design :)
- Ygg2 10y ago
  They seem to have advantage for color blind people, no? It's easier to disambiguate shapes than colors.
  - calvins 10y ago
    It's easier to disambiguate shapes and colors than just shapes or just colors -- something like a checkmark of one color, and an X of a different color.
    - i386 10y ago
      FWIW We've got colored indicators that have appropriate iconography for these kinds of users.
- JorgeGT 10y ago
  I agree with you, and it's very easy to test. Print 15 mixed weather icons on one sheet of paper and 15 red/green/orange circles in another. Show them to test subjects for 1-2 seconds, and ask them to assess the situation. Now repeat the test, but showing the sheets from two meters away. Our brain is really good at color cues, and especially red = danger is deeply wired into us!
  - crummy 10y ago
    Red = danger doesn't seem to be so widespread outside the western world: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/colours-in-cultures/ http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/colours...
    - oblio 10y ago
      Possible, on the other hand traffic lights around the world have pretty much standardized on: - green/blue: safe/go - (optional) yellow: caution - red: danger/stop I don't know of any country where this convention is not in use.
      - i386 10y ago
        As I learnt looking into the indicators the accessibility of traffic lights had a lot more to do with their vertical position than their colors. Can't use solid green, yellow and red if we want them to be understood by people with various forms of color blindness.
        tylermac1 10y ago
        But you could make colorblind-friendly color schemes available through plugins instead of making a slightly more confusing option default.
        i386 10y ago
        Do you mean the weather icons? They are not the alternative to properly designed status indicators. Take a look at this https://jenkins.io/images/post-images/blueocean/pr-view.png https://jenkins.io/images/post-images/blueocean/pr-view.png There's more about why and when we use them in my other comments.
    - JorgeGT 10y ago
      Since the graph list "web sources" as a source, a cursory web search of "danger sign + region" reveals that red seems predominant in danger signs from: - India: http://3.imimg.com/data3/II/GU/MY-762554/danger-signs-boards-500x500.jpg http://3.imimg.com/data3/II/GU/MY-762554/danger-signs-boards... - Asia: http://cache4.asset-cache.net/gc/152921698-warning-these-signs-are-placed-by-mines-gettyimages.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=UdpLW%2FNwgyJBXS8bvU3B0JP45L0APBXzoe2WeYvI88iSZA616eQybUb29WU%2F9Y%2BO http://cache4.asset-cache.net/gc/152921698-warning-these-sig... - Africa: http://www.lifeloveandsugar.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/danger-sign.png http://www.lifeloveandsugar.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/d... - Middle East: http://cache3.asset-cache.net/gc/474346969-an-israeli-sign-is-displayed-on-a-road-at-gettyimages.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=GkZZ8bf5zL1ZiijUmxa7QZ0g8WYG9hGH0gmJ76R1NjT0YR6Kr%2F8%2B%2FYm5DvBrLHjzyIqwIuhXFw6OVyjDieaX1w%3D%3D http://cache3.asset-cache.net/gc/474346969-an-israeli-sign-i...
- i386 10y ago
  Well the weather icons do have meaning - they are a historical indicator of how successful your build or deployment process is. We show these along side the color accessible status indicators except on the non-personalized dashboard. On the dashboard, they indicate the historical health of your most important branch (e.g. Master)
  - BinaryIdiot 10y ago
    Maybe it's me but I don't care about historical health. For my projects I only care about its current health because anything Jenkins builds is going to successfully build (when it doesn't it's a fluke because we shouldn't be checking in broken things). Not sure if I'm in the minority here or not though but it actually bothers me if, say, I misconfigured something, build breaks, I fix it but now it's showing it's cloudy. It also took me way too long to realize that cloudy meant it built but failed in the past. I remember my first experience with Jenkins trying to figure out why the build was failing before realizing it wasn't failing and cloudy somehow meant it's good.
    - i386 10y ago
      Noted - let me have a think about that. Might be worth having a look at the Personalised Dashboard in the blog again - that always shows the current status. Most screens refer either to the status of each branch or a specific job result. for the former a single status indicator wouldn't be appropriate. But what I'm hearing is the non-Personalised dashboard may be a point of contention.
      - curun1r 10y ago
        I'd like to add a me too comment, but with another thought about historical build health. It's not that I don't find it useful, but I'd rather see it along with my other metrics rather than included in the UI of my CI tool. If Jenkins could be used as a Grafana source or were able to export build metrics to Influx/Prometheus, people could use existing tooling/dashboards to display build health over time while keeping the main Jenkins UI clean and focused on the current state of the builds. Also, and I apologize if this is no longer how the Jenkins weather indicators work, but the last time I used Jenkins, the weather indicators were based on the number of failed builds, not the time the build wasn't green. For me, the number of failed builds is far less interesting than the amount of time that the build was failing. If a developer scrambles with three checkins in 15 minutes that attempt to fix the build and the third one succeeds, that's a better situation than a developer who takes a more measured approach that fixes the build four hours later on the first checkin. The first developer might have created a slightly messier commit history, but the second developer blocked the entire team for half a day. Taking the view that historical build information is really time series data would, to me, be much more insightful.
kevinbowman 10y ago
Yes, please, either remove them or at replace them with something more meaningful. Every time I see one I have to hover over it to figure out whether something's actually wrong, and (confession time...) sometimes I even deliberately trigger a bunch of (non-)builds so it goes sunny again. If you want to show the state of the last 5 builds, then... show the state of the last 5 builds. e.g. ynyyY (imagine unicode ticks and crosses instead) Just my tuppence. For the record, Jenkins is amazing in how it has sparked a revolution in the CI world, and I love it, but the weather icons do wind me up somewhat. Edit: replaced unicode ticks and crosses with y and n because they weren't showing up.
- kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
  A mini pie-chart would suffice to show recent history. Current status could be in the center with five or six slices around the perimeter showing historical results.
  - glenjamin 10y ago
    Pie charts are almost always a poor way to show information. http://www.businessinsider.com/pie-charts-are-the-worst-2013-6?IR=T http://www.businessinsider.com/pie-charts-are-the-worst-2013... For what you're suggesting a horizontal thermometer shape might work, as that would make the historical order more obvious (Y)nnyyn
    - i386 10y ago
      That's a great idea - will take it into consideration :)
    - kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
      They are poor for showing relative proportion. In this application they would be fine since it would only be ancillary info that doesn't need to be scrutinized.
  - stephenconnolly 10y ago
    It's not supposed to be just recent history. The weather is also supposed to be: * the code coverage of the most recent build, * the findbugs / violations count of the most recent build * any other health metric that plugins decide to contribute to the build. The icon is supposed to be the icon of whichever report is the worst health and FTR each plugin has always had the option to define their own icons (see my other reply for a more detailed background)

Interesting - why do you think they should be removed? I purposely kept them because they felt a very positive part of the Jenkins personality.

by i386 10y ago

Interesting - why do you think they should be removed? I purposely kept them because they felt a very positive part of the Jenkins personality.

jupp0r 10y ago

Just a matter of personal taste, they don't deliver the fast visual clues to me that simple red and green elements do in other CI systems like bamboo. From a distance, they look quite similar and that fails to give me a quick overview. From my experience, they are a very polarizing piece of UI design :)

Ygg2 10y ago
They seem to have advantage for color blind people, no? It's easier to disambiguate shapes than colors.
- calvins 10y ago
  It's easier to disambiguate shapes and colors than just shapes or just colors -- something like a checkmark of one color, and an X of a different color.
  - i386 10y ago
    FWIW We've got colored indicators that have appropriate iconography for these kinds of users.
JorgeGT 10y ago
I agree with you, and it's very easy to test. Print 15 mixed weather icons on one sheet of paper and 15 red/green/orange circles in another. Show them to test subjects for 1-2 seconds, and ask them to assess the situation. Now repeat the test, but showing the sheets from two meters away. Our brain is really good at color cues, and especially red = danger is deeply wired into us!
- crummy 10y ago
  Red = danger doesn't seem to be so widespread outside the western world: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/colours-in-cultures/ http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/colours...
  - oblio 10y ago
    Possible, on the other hand traffic lights around the world have pretty much standardized on: - green/blue: safe/go - (optional) yellow: caution - red: danger/stop I don't know of any country where this convention is not in use.
    - i386 10y ago
      As I learnt looking into the indicators the accessibility of traffic lights had a lot more to do with their vertical position than their colors. Can't use solid green, yellow and red if we want them to be understood by people with various forms of color blindness.
      - tylermac1 10y ago
        But you could make colorblind-friendly color schemes available through plugins instead of making a slightly more confusing option default.
        i386 10y ago
        Do you mean the weather icons? They are not the alternative to properly designed status indicators. Take a look at this https://jenkins.io/images/post-images/blueocean/pr-view.png https://jenkins.io/images/post-images/blueocean/pr-view.png There's more about why and when we use them in my other comments.
  - JorgeGT 10y ago
    Since the graph list "web sources" as a source, a cursory web search of "danger sign + region" reveals that red seems predominant in danger signs from: - India: http://3.imimg.com/data3/II/GU/MY-762554/danger-signs-boards-500x500.jpg http://3.imimg.com/data3/II/GU/MY-762554/danger-signs-boards... - Asia: http://cache4.asset-cache.net/gc/152921698-warning-these-signs-are-placed-by-mines-gettyimages.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=UdpLW%2FNwgyJBXS8bvU3B0JP45L0APBXzoe2WeYvI88iSZA616eQybUb29WU%2F9Y%2BO http://cache4.asset-cache.net/gc/152921698-warning-these-sig... - Africa: http://www.lifeloveandsugar.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/danger-sign.png http://www.lifeloveandsugar.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/d... - Middle East: http://cache3.asset-cache.net/gc/474346969-an-israeli-sign-is-displayed-on-a-road-at-gettyimages.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=GkZZ8bf5zL1ZiijUmxa7QZ0g8WYG9hGH0gmJ76R1NjT0YR6Kr%2F8%2B%2FYm5DvBrLHjzyIqwIuhXFw6OVyjDieaX1w%3D%3D http://cache3.asset-cache.net/gc/474346969-an-israeli-sign-i...
i386 10y ago
Well the weather icons do have meaning - they are a historical indicator of how successful your build or deployment process is. We show these along side the color accessible status indicators except on the non-personalized dashboard. On the dashboard, they indicate the historical health of your most important branch (e.g. Master)
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  Maybe it's me but I don't care about historical health. For my projects I only care about its current health because anything Jenkins builds is going to successfully build (when it doesn't it's a fluke because we shouldn't be checking in broken things). Not sure if I'm in the minority here or not though but it actually bothers me if, say, I misconfigured something, build breaks, I fix it but now it's showing it's cloudy. It also took me way too long to realize that cloudy meant it built but failed in the past. I remember my first experience with Jenkins trying to figure out why the build was failing before realizing it wasn't failing and cloudy somehow meant it's good.
  - i386 10y ago
    Noted - let me have a think about that. Might be worth having a look at the Personalised Dashboard in the blog again - that always shows the current status. Most screens refer either to the status of each branch or a specific job result. for the former a single status indicator wouldn't be appropriate. But what I'm hearing is the non-Personalised dashboard may be a point of contention.
    - curun1r 10y ago
      I'd like to add a me too comment, but with another thought about historical build health. It's not that I don't find it useful, but I'd rather see it along with my other metrics rather than included in the UI of my CI tool. If Jenkins could be used as a Grafana source or were able to export build metrics to Influx/Prometheus, people could use existing tooling/dashboards to display build health over time while keeping the main Jenkins UI clean and focused on the current state of the builds. Also, and I apologize if this is no longer how the Jenkins weather indicators work, but the last time I used Jenkins, the weather indicators were based on the number of failed builds, not the time the build wasn't green. For me, the number of failed builds is far less interesting than the amount of time that the build was failing. If a developer scrambles with three checkins in 15 minutes that attempt to fix the build and the third one succeeds, that's a better situation than a developer who takes a more measured approach that fixes the build four hours later on the first checkin. The first developer might have created a slightly messier commit history, but the second developer blocked the entire team for half a day. Taking the view that historical build information is really time series data would, to me, be much more insightful.

kevinbowman 10y ago

Yes, please, either remove them or at replace them with something more meaningful. Every time I see one I have to hover over it to figure out whether something's actually wrong, and (confession time...) sometimes I even deliberately trigger a bunch of (non-)builds so it goes sunny again. If you want to show the state of the last 5 builds, then... show the state of the last 5 builds. e.g. ynyyY (imagine unicode ticks and crosses instead) Just my tuppence. For the record, Jenkins is amazing in how it has sparked a revolution in the CI world, and I love it, but the weather icons do wind me up somewhat. Edit: replaced unicode ticks and crosses with y and n because they weren't showing up.

kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
A mini pie-chart would suffice to show recent history. Current status could be in the center with five or six slices around the perimeter showing historical results.
- glenjamin 10y ago
  Pie charts are almost always a poor way to show information. http://www.businessinsider.com/pie-charts-are-the-worst-2013-6?IR=T http://www.businessinsider.com/pie-charts-are-the-worst-2013... For what you're suggesting a horizontal thermometer shape might work, as that would make the historical order more obvious (Y)nnyyn
  - i386 10y ago
    That's a great idea - will take it into consideration :)
  - kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
    They are poor for showing relative proportion. In this application they would be fine since it would only be ancillary info that doesn't need to be scrutinized.
- stephenconnolly 10y ago
  It's not supposed to be just recent history. The weather is also supposed to be: * the code coverage of the most recent build, * the findbugs / violations count of the most recent build * any other health metric that plugins decide to contribute to the build. The icon is supposed to be the icon of whichever report is the worst health and FTR each plugin has always had the option to define their own icons (see my other reply for a more detailed background)