On Fri, Jul 10, 2015 at 9:33 AM, Martyn Haigh <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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.
>
> tl;dr. (Actually, I'm kidding -- I read it.) But there are a lot of
folks pushing on these angles:
* Right now, Desktop ships "Experiments" to a subset of people. These tend
not to be user facing, IIUC.
* There's a much larger effort to opt Desktop users into user-facing
experiments. I don't know the engineers involved here but jgruen has been
doing a lot of design work around this. I think this went under the name
"Idea Lab". I don't know how advanced this work is.
Nick
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