Explaining priority setting better

(Summary of a tea time with @Bmueller at Wikimania Hackathon.)

Related pages:

• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Phabricator_etiquette
• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Team_Practices_Group/Phabricator_tips#Prioritization
• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Phabricator_etiquette

Two main user groups in Phab setting priority: People working on something and planning vs. people who want to express that something is important.

Potentially unclear audience when setting priority. It's not just prioritizing work for a team/project but also anybody looking at the task (any community members, reporters, etc) and that anybody also interprets the priority value.

Different interpretations of "Low priority": Does not necessarily mean the task is not important; means that it's just not on the to-do list of anybody for the next months.

Setting priority affects *all* projects associated to a task.

(Teams can put tasks into the Backlog column of their workboard; regardless of any task priority)

Next step: Not only "explain better the priority setting done by developers/product managers/etc." but also provide a way how a person "outside of a dev/eng team" can express that a task breaks a person's workflow / should get more attention / is important to the person.

Pretty interesting approaches by the Blender folks by using dashboards on the frontpage with direct links, and on the bug reporting page custom URL parameters to display more user-friendly guidelines inline, plus custom content in the fields to fill out.

Screenshots:

In T103556#1458377, @Aklapper wrote:

Explaining priority setting better

Two main user groups in Phab setting priority: People working on something and planning vs. people who want to express that something is important.

One could break down the last group into more pieces, e.g. regarding editors see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Engagement_%28Product%29/Process_ideas#Bug_Prioritisation_by_editors

Re the screenshots, certainly adding walls of text during task submission doesn't fall under "making phabricator more welcoming". Our issue #1 is getting users to report their issues.

I'd rather go for getting users to report their issues with sufficient information to reproduce/debug.
But yes too much text, I agree. :)

Another example of differing Priority understanding/interpretation: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T110950#1625816

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WMDE_Technical_Wishes_Concept.pdf (though most of that is rather Community-Tech territory)

Based on T103556#1458377 I've edited https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Phabricator%2FProject_management&type=revision&diff=1910769&oldid=1910724

Further outcome of this task:

• T64324: Visually indicate when a Phabricator user is new (Welcome culture)
  • T115017: For new Phab accounts, link to [[mw:How to report a bug]] at the top of task creation form
• T91538: Make new tasks within a specific project use a template in description field
• T115016: Find way to make clearer how task "Priority" field is supposed to be used and set
• Some aspects of this task when I created it are nowadays handled by WMF's Community-Tech team.

Closing as resolved. Because this is what I learned. :)