Better way to show Priority Level in drop down

Question

I just found below drop down for showing priority levels in JIRA:

Does the above drop down - with icons and supporting message clearly demonstrates the priority levels?

If not, then what will be the better way to show priority levels consisting of 5 levels.

Answer 1

Does the above drop down - with icons and supporting message clearly demonstrates the priority levels?

Actually you do not have icons and supporting message because icons are supporting text message: icons alone are not clear enough to live without text.

In general icons need more active brain activity to be decodified than plain text unless it's a trivial standing-out symbol. Five icons with pretty arbitrary symbols aren't trivial enough and they're more decorative than useful.

If not, then what will be the better way to show priority levels consisting of 5 levels.

Drop icons and leave text. If context knowledge isn't enough to be sure users will understand what priority means then add some help. Five symbols are too many to be quickly recognized and scanned. Text and position in the list will play a more crucial role for users.

As side note: icon and color aren't useful in this case (because you have a dropdown with a small list) but same it's not true in other scenarios (tables, dashboards) where they both may help (it's material for another post but I'd reduce their number to three or less: low priority, high priority and critical).

Note that IMO priority doesn't match well with Trivial and an icon won't clarify this enough. What you're seeing is an aggregated index (a trivial to fix bug may have high priority because it happens 99.9% and users data will be corrupted). I think, in this case, proper wording is more important than icon with/without text message issue but decision is domain driven and shouldn't be generalized. Do you want to explicit that a trivial bug has low priority (because of any obscure company policy)? Write it, users won't need to guess or to interpret an icon:

• P1 Higher - blocker
• P2 High - critical
• P3 Normal - major
• P4 Low - minor
• P5 Lower - trivial

What I mean (I'm not sure it's clear) is that trivial is not a possible value for priority as 10 centimeters is not a possible value for hair color. However priority depends on other factors then if you label that box with priority you should (IMO) also provide proper priority values in your text.

Answer 2

The icons won't be clear without the words.

The words depend on how you're using Priority in your development process.

Priority is often calculated from other factors, such as:

• Severity: does the bug destroy customer data?
• Cost: What is the estimated effort, or cost, to fix the bug?
• Commonality: How many users are affected by this?
• Frequency: How often will a given user encounter the bug?

In my experience working with Dev teams, most teams consider two factors, sometimes three: the severity, cost, and the number of people affected. It's possible to calculate the priority automatically, but teams often use their judgement to assign a priority. Cost is considered more often for the lower-priority bugs. An inconsequential bug that's expensive to fix will not likely be fixed.

I hope this helps you move forward.

Answer 3

As we all know that, User read from left to right, but in your example you are showing icon first, then text... I would recommend you to place an icon in right and text at left. I agree that the images are more attractive than text only but do not forget that text is more informative then image as it describe the purpose. Images are always used to support your text and to enhance the aesthetics, but the user will understand the purpose once he read the text.

Taking an example of news apps of current trend you will find that they are serving headline and summary first in left and then image in right so that way user better understand the news and relate the image to it.