New UI is confusing and counter inuitive for changing affected package

He's right.; there is already a link inside the expander, and the inconsistency here really bites you unexpectedly.

I've since noticed that the same thing applies to Assigned To

We could consider having an expander appear consistently there, instead of undoing the link.

Implementation is basically done, but it's going to be landed in the next cycle (1.2.2) to provide a longer testing period on edge.

Fixed in r5597. The change should be visible on edge tomorrow, please have a look.

This is definitely an improvement, but still suffers from inconsistency. I like having the triangles to click on to open up the edit bits. That's good. The part I would still question is that clicking on the package name under affects takes you away to the package page whereas clicking on the words for status and importance take you to the editing section.

Since the package overview is available on the page (tab marked overview), I don't understand why you want to maintain a second link to the same place when it behaves radically differently than similar looking links right next to it.

My assessment is that this is better, but fundamentally it's not fixed.

It seems we have two different approaches, one old, one new.

The status and importance fields act in the old way, they take you to +editstatus

Clicking on the product name under affects will take you to the product. Yet the drop down takes you to +editstatus.
Clicking on the account under Assigned to will take you to the account. Yet the drop down takes you to +editstatus.

I believe the drop downs are correct. The action I would expect here is to click on them and edit the bug report.

I think we can improve the consistency by changing the Status link so that it links to https://help.launchpad.net/BugStatuses but leaving the drop down so it links to +editstatus. In this same vein, I propose we unlink the importance (e.g. high, medium) but keep the drop down link to +editstatus. These changes should make the display more consistent and folks (like me) can relearn the mappings without having to process exceptions. This would also specifically address Bug 185853 (which is a dup of Bug 29495). We could make this changes as part of Bug 29495.

Is this really "fix released"? What I see is a teensy drop-down icon next to Affects and Assigned to which links to +editstatus, whereas the Affects and Assigned to fields continue to link to the package overview and the assignee's assigned bugs, respectively. (Or is the only deployed elsewhere than here?)

The drop-down icon is now the canonical way to expand the table if you
have Javascript enabled. If you don't, then it is the canonical way to
get to +editstatus.

We've kept the links on Status and Importance for now, but we could remove
them in the future (to reinforce the above.)

It's still inconsistent. Why do we need two links to the package page on the bug page? This is a slight improvement, but not at all fixed in my opinion.

I concur. If I want the package's overview page, I will hardly expect that particular link to take me there, and there are other links to the overview in more logical places. That "Affects" link should be removed, or do something else; perhaps expand the table and/or link to +editstatus, like the two which do so.

For consistency, I suppose the same applies to the assignee link; if it really plays a role for anybody to have direct access to a list of the assignee's bugs, I would propose to put that on a separate link and mark it as such.

Not fixed.

I've subscribed MPT to this bug.

MPT, could you please read through this bug an comment on this. I believe you might be able to shed some light on why the drop-downs differ in function from the actual links. I think the simplest solution might be to remove the links to +editstatus for importance and status. Or, to make it more consistent, link them to the relevant areas in help.launchpad.net. Although, I don't have any opinions on Scott's and Era's comments above. Thanks.

What is weird about the current situation is that clicking on two of the text of two of the fields, "status" and "importance, lets you edit the bug and while the other two fields take you to an entirely different page. On top of that, for "affects" and "assigned to" the drop down arrow is separate from the link whereas it's not for "status" and "importance" (since they would currently be going to the same place I'm guessing).

My thoughts would be to have only one drop down arrow on the far left. Right now we have 4 drop-downs that all do the same thing. A person expects that a different drop-down will do a different thing. After that I'd suggest linking the "Status" and "Importance" fields to help.lp.net pages describing them (which is an added documentation benefit) . For the non-JavaScript the drop-down arrow could be replaced with a link to +editstatus I would think. How does that sound?

My suggestion is put it back like it was before. That was fine.

As I said in bug 138155, the current presentation was specified by Mark, and tweaked by Bjorn (moving the eject symbols from the right to the left). I agree with Scott's and era's comments.

I've filed bug 195723 to cover the work that was actually done to fix this bug. Unless we agree on something concrete to fix this bug, this bug will never be fixed. What's confusing for some people. are not confusing for other people. I'm lowering the importance, since I think it's less confusing than before.

Matthew, please come up with an acceptable design, and schedule as you see fit.

For the record, bug 185853 (which is marked as a duplicate of bug 29495 in turn) covers the documentation of "Status" and "Importance" in Jordan Mantha's comment. Overall, I agree with his ideas -- a single expander seems logical (maybe then you could make it bigger, too). Perhaps you could simply remove all the links, and do away with the confusion? Or, change all of the fields to link to +editstatus (or, with JavaScript, expose the hidden editable representation).

I notice now that "Assigned to" doesn't get underlined when I hover over it, unlike the others. I'm too lazy to report a separate bug about that, too.

There doesn't appear to be any confusion about the inadequacy of the current design. From what I can see in the discussion about this bug is that the boss specified the current design and people are reluctant to go tell him it needs to be revisited.

With four items in a row, it makes no sense from a U/I perspective to have clicking on text in the middle two do one thing and clicking on the outer two do something entirely different. No one disputes that. The only question is do the developers care enough to go talk to the boss about it.

I've paper-prototyped a new design and tried it on half a dozen people. Two of them understood it, but it took them both a couple of minutes of thinking about it. The other four "clicked" directly on something that would have taken them to the wrong place.

So, back to the drawing board. :-)

Just put it back like it was before I filed the bug. It worked just fine.

I think this is fixed now, because we have popups for all these fields.

Only the product can be changed, not a package or distribution.