Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pessimism 4432 days ago
Communicating the progress of a project or feature is something really important I think open-source people need to realize, when they have a fairly non-technical audience.

I think GitHub milestones are central to productivity and communicating progress to a base of interested parties, so I would recommend focusing on milestones specifically—also to encourage their use—rather than showing one huge list of issues by default. It’s fairly disorienting, even to me as a regular GitHub user and contributor.

Those cards take up an awful lot of vertical space, which I don’t think is going to scale well with a large project. Look at project like Bootstrap: https://waffle.io/twbs/bootstrap. Because you load the issue on scroll, I can’t even get an idea of how many issues there are from the size of my scroll bar. Milestones are the main way for repo owners to manage a large number of issues.

From what I could tell, you can sort by milestones using a filter, but for some reason, the list of milestones wouldn’t load?

A while back, I created a small never-to-be-finished project called milestones.js to involve a general audience in the progress of upcoming features—taking advantage of milestones: https://github.com/ndarville/milestones.js. At the bottom of the README are some related projects that might be of interest to you as well.

In other words:

1. Find out who you want your users to be.

2. Find out what they should be shown.

3. Focus on milestones, GitHub’s killer productivity feature.

4. Fit more issues vertically; the card metaphor isn’t that important.

5. Know that the dynamic loading of issues on scroll is working against you from a UX perspective.