cc UX –– Darrin Henein ∙ Design Lead, Firefox Mobile ∙ Mozilla
> On Jul 10, 2015, at 12:45 PM, Nicholas Alexander <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > > On Fri, Jul 10, 2015 at 9:33 AM, Martyn Haigh <[email protected] > <mailto:[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: > Users sign up with the knowledge that this is our testing ground and all that > entails. > 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 > _______________________________________________ > mobile-firefox-dev mailing list > [email protected] > https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/mobile-firefox-dev
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