Hey people,
At the start of the year I wrote a bit of functionality called Tab Queues
which stemmed from a personal desire to do something different in how
people use Firefox. I spent a lot of time learning the codebase (it was the
biggest bit of work I've done on Fennec by myself since I joined the team),
creating patches, working out where I went wrong and redoing patches.
The Mozilla workweek at Whistler recently got me thinking a lot about how
we use our time, and if we are using it in the best possible way (hint:
we've got no idea). We're at the stage where Tab Queue V1 looks ready to
ship and what is troubling me is that we still have no idea if this is a
feature that people want rather than something we see as 'neat'.
Really before a feature rides the trains I'd like to ship it to a group of
people who aren't our nightly users [1] and I'd like to get feedback from
them. We don't have a way of doing either of these things at the moment as
Beta is on lockdown for production ready code and we just don't really have
any way of getting actual feedback from users other than usage stats from
the telemetry data which is somewhat hand-wavey. We're flying blind and it
seems crazy to me that we often put in months of work on a feature when we
haven't even justified it's existence with real users.
The way we operate at the moment in terms of letting features ride the
trains is great from a stability point of view, but not so great from an
experimentation / feedback point of view. It seems that we don't know if
people are going to like a feature until we ship it, by which point it's
too late to get constructive feedback. Apparently we have an early Beta
flag which we can use, but personally I don't understand why it's there.
Imagine if we shipped TQ behind this flag, users will start using and at
some point shortly after it'll just disappear as if it were never there.
It's time to try something new. I've got some ideas:
- We introduce a new channel which runs alongside Beta but differs in
two ways:
1. Users sign up with the knowledge that this is our testing ground and
all that entails.
2. We build a feedback mechanism in to the channel, similar to the
heartbeat on desktop ("How do you feel about <feature x>" - Happy face /
Sad face with room for comments)
We ship features in this channel which may never see the light of day; this
channel doesn't necessarily follow the same release schedule as Beta/Prod
and doesn't represent a final product (although it'll mostly be stable
enough to use as a daily driver). Using this channel allows users to test
features and also provide feedback for these features, giving them a voice
as to what works or not within Fennec. It allows us to prototype an idea
without having to get it to production level polish. We don't worry about
localisation at the moment and instead concentrate on getting ideas out and
getting feedback in.
- Or we introduce a "Labs" section in Beta which enables users to opt in
to our testing ground. We then build and release features to beta which
are hidden behind flags. The downside of this is that it wouldn't help in
the case of TQ which requests a permission bump as we can't currently
request permissions on the fly (come on Android M!). Also shipping stable
code is important and Beta is a great way of ensuring that our production
code is ready, I'm reluctant to mess with Beta too much.
Anyway, I really think that we need to work on validating ideas and getting
feedback and I'd love to kick off a discussion about validating my thoughts
(like what I did there?!)
What do you guys think?
Martyn
[1] I don't know how different our nightly users are from our beta/prod
users but because of the different delivery mechanism I'd argue that they
are more power users than the users who download from the play store.
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