800521 - Firefox Marketplace logo should indicate Aurora

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Marketplace Graveyard :: Consumer Pages, defect, P1)

Description

[David Bialer [:dbialer]]

David (Slater) is coming to you with a request to reflect the "Aurora" status of the Firefox Marketplace in our branding somehow. Maria I'm sure he could use your ideas.

This is a request from Outbound Marketing as well as the Fennec Product Manager (and also positions the Marketplace quite well to our consumer audience, who may recall Mozilla's Aurora > Beta rails process)

The hope is that we can make this update live Oct 18, so clearly the solution needs to be something quick, easy to implement with low risk and easy to back out as we'll only be in Aurora status for a period of a few weeks.

Comment 1

[Andy McKay]

Can't we just call it alpha? Calling it Aurora puts me in mind that it's somehow related to Firefox or Fennec releases and it's really not. It's not on a train and Web Apps landed in Firefox 16 which isn't Aurora.

I'm sure we hope it only be a few weeks, but chances are it won't.

Comment 2

[Matt Basta [:basta]]

I think this change is also going to be exceptionally confusing for our existing developers. We've already gone through rebranding at least once in recent memory. Marking the marketplace as "aurora" suggests that our previously-(currently)-good-to-ship product is no longer ready to be public.

Comment 3

[Maria Sandberg [:mushi]]

If you'd like to bring up real a discussion about this you will need to get David Slater, Chad Weiner and Sean Martell on the bug.

Comment 4

[Andy McKay]

Alrighty, cc'd.

Comment 5

[Chad Weiner [:chadw]]

Howdy to those who I haven't met yet!  Happy to provide the rationale here as a lot of really good thinking went into the decision making process and apologies to those who were not directly involved in those conversations; it's unfortunate this is a surprise, but things are (always) moving quickly.

The balance we're trying to strike with this release boils down to: how do we both stimulate developer acquisition by showing product momentum while at the same time insulating us from negative feedback that may result from "overselling" the product we can launch on the 18th.  We think branding this release "Firefox Marketplace Aurora" gives us the best chance to succeed.

Our press knows that the Aurora label indicates something that is "on the trains" but really still a work in progress.  We think the stories they write will reflect this outlook.  While we'd like to be able to be more bullish with developers--showing them something more robust or talking about a more robust "Beta", we think "Aurora" is as far as we think we can go in this direction without inviting the press to dump on us. 

Yes, the fact that web apps landed in 16 makes our job more complicated, but it's still our best foot forward and we can message around it.

To Matt's question: we believe Aurora actually represents the opposite momentum--a move in the "more public" direction than our previous release of a "Developer Preview", which by definition is more limited.  

To Andy's point: though you're right--this release/product isn't tied to Firefox or Fennec releases, we are leveraging our audiences' understanding of our trains to make it seem like it's following a similar path; so what you're finding questionable is exactly what we're trying to do. :)

I hope this helps everyone understand why we believe Aurora is the best way to meet our somewhat competing goals for this release.  As with everything, we'll monitor this to see if we're hitting our goals and if not, we can re-evaluate.  Thanks for listening!

Comment 6

[Christopher Van Wiemeersch [:cvan]]

How's this? http://cl.ly/image/1R232U303h38/o

Comment 7

[Andy McKay]

I'm glad we will examine goals and re-evaluating our goals. But we've rebranded the marketplace so many times from Developer Beta to Mozillian Preview and now to Aurora, so let's try and avoid that. It's getting confusing for developers.

To me if you don't know what Aurora is, you have to explain it. If you do know what Aurora is, you have to explain why it's different from Aurora on a product. 

If I was being pedantic, I'd label the dev and staging servers "Nightly" and "Aurora", that's where features come down the pipe to developers into  the production marketplace. That's where we'll send people to try out payments, signing and so on.

Comment 8

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

It's not clear to me why Aurora is more effective than Alpha if we're trying to express the store is not in a beta state yet.  Aurora is understood by a *far* smaller group of people than Aurora.

That said, I'm assigning this to David to clarify the request - we need something actionable.  If you need "Aurora" in the name we'll need Maria to work magic since it was way too long of a string on mobile when we played with it last week.

Comment 9

[Chad Weiner [:chadw]]

Andy/Will--appreciate the comments, these were certainly views that we evaluated during the decision making process.  I believe Maria and John Slater worked out a solution so we should be all good to go.

Comment 10

[David Bialer [:dbialer]]

I think Chad captured the rationale in a previous comment (5).  John Slater has developed new graphic vector file which has been handed off to Maria to generate the appropriately-sized bitmap graphic.

Comment 11

[Maria Sandberg [:mushi]]

Branding decided to update the logo with the aurora color scheme + a sash. Wordmarks plus new icon uploaded to this bug as attachments.

Comment 12

[Maria Sandberg [:mushi]]

Attachment: .png AURORA icon-wordmark 200x30

Comment 13

[Maria Sandberg [:mushi]]

Attachment: .png AURORA icon-wordmark 400x60

Comment 14

[Christopher Van Wiemeersch [:cvan]]

If our target audience is tech-savvy, English-speaking Firefox users and Mozilla employees, "Aurora" is arguably not the worst name. If our target audience is at all broader than that, (1) "Aurora" as a graphic cannot be localized and (2) "Aurora" does not translate to "alpha" in any language (including English).

What user research has been done in making this decision?

Comment 15

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

-> cvan to get the new wordmarks in

Comment 16

[Matt Basta [:basta]]

Don't these new assets violate rule #1 of the new Mozilla Styleguide?

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/styleguide/identity/marketplace/branding/

Have these colors been evaluated to "ensure you’re staying consistent with the Marketplace brand"?

Comment 17

[Maria Sandberg [:mushi]]

(In reply to Matt Basta [:basta] from comment #16)
> Have these colors been evaluated to "ensure you’re staying consistent with
> the Marketplace brand"?

The graphics were provided by branding, so we should be okay.

Comment 18

[Christopher Van Wiemeersch [:cvan]]

(In reply to Chris Van Wiemeersch [:cvan] from comment #14)

> What user research has been done in making this decision?

Can we get an answer here?

Comment 19

[David Bialer [:dbialer]]

cvan - to answer your questions
No user research was conducted over the past week since this decision was made by the steering committee. This was not something that was thought of nor would the time frame allow user research as to whether to label it an Aurora release.   It is a bit unusual for Mozilla. It is actually somewhat, marketing-wise, tied to the Fennec Aurora release in terms of how it will be handled as a release.  So it will have an limited audience.  It will be promoted to this audience with a banner within Fennec.  It will accessible to Fennec beta users as well if they know the URL or go the about:home.  I believe that there are some other ways that it will be promoted - but with a developer, not an end user, in mind.  We need more content.

The term Aurora was decided during the go/no-go decision to accomplish a few things (I wasn't at this meeting):
1. Get feedback - which is what the Aurora channel typically does.  This is a great time to get feedback under "friendly fire" from mobile early adopters and other developers.
2. Limit the audience for distribution based on the fact that the a) Marketplace does not yet accept transactions, and b) there will be a very limited number of titles available for Android users.
3. By calling it Aurora, set expectations for the press that this is coming and that they are seeing an early version (which we would like since there are only a very few apps) and limit the comparison to more mature app stores.
4. Signal to developers that this is coming and give them an indication of where this is headed.

I understand that this may not be a popular as it seems to be getting a lot of questions, but I tried to lay out the internal thinking.

Comment 20

[Jason Smith [:jsmith]]

Note - if we were to update the marketplace icon for this Aurora release, we would ensure consistency across both FF Android client's use of the marketplace icons in the promo and about:apps and the website as well. Otherwise, there's a likelihood of confusion. bug 801508 was marked as a WONTFIX on the client implementation. So there's confusion on the right approach here.

I also generally agree with the developers comments above about the massive amount of confusion being established of using different preview release naming conventions. It's pretty close to release at this point, so I feel strongly to WONTFIX this in my opinion, as I'd really rather not scramble to update and test two sets of implementations (website and client code) with new icons and then later, have to change it in a beta branch (if it rides the trains to beta).

Comment 21

[Jason Smith [:jsmith]]

Also - this might establish confusion with our b2g implementation if we modify this. And I really feel strongly to not play brand juggling after a feature freeze deadline.

Comment 22

[Maria Sandberg [:mushi]]

To be clear: This is a temporary change of the graphic that sits in the navigation bar of Marketplace. I don't see how it would affect b2g. 

In this case I'm the messenger - if you want to get a change of decision you need to talk to Chad Weiner, David Bialer, and the steering committee(? referring to David's comment 19).

If we are going ahead with the change I agree with Jason that we should make sure that the icon in the promo corresponds to the icon used in the Marketplace. If we cannot change the icon in the promo I would suggest that we remove it. If we can't remove the icon in the promo we have to either not change anything to Aurora or live with the inconsistency.

Comment 23

[Jason Smith [:jsmith]]

(In reply to Maria Sandberg [:mushi] from comment #22)
> To be clear: This is a temporary change of the graphic that sits in the
> navigation bar of Marketplace. I don't see how it would affect b2g. 

It's a minor effect only in the sense that the marketplace app icon on the b2g homescreen would be different than the marketplace app icon used on the website. It might result in false bugs getting filed during dogfooding. That might be something worth living with, however.

Comment 24

[Davor Spasovski [:spasovski]]

may God have mercy on my soul: https://github.com/mozilla/zamboni/commit/8bd29ac

Comment 25

[Matt Basta [:basta]]

Can someone in branding please take a look at these assets and make sure that Maria didn't corrupt the color profile or something when she converted the graphics? Just want to double check that it's not supposed to look good.

Comment 26

[Matt Basta [:basta]]

Attachment: Screenshot

Comment 27

[Matt Basta [:basta]]

In all seriousness, I want to make absolutely sure that this is what you intend for our header to look like.

Comment 28

[David Bialer [:dbialer]]

Thanks Matt.  Thanks for calling it out.  Looked much better when viewed in photoshop at a higher resolution.  

The Aurora sash is too small to be readable.  And hopefully we can fix that in the next release.  Will ask the creative folks to help fix it.

As far as the color, there was some subtleties in color gradation lost on scaling down the graphic, but the purple is going to stay.  You either love it or hate it, but let's disagree and commit.

We are going to roll with it.  As my grandma used to say, "She may not be perty but she ain't no a blocker or P1."  We may update later. And , if we go to beta, we may expect some more branding fun in our future!

For those interested, there is a new branding guide that is more interesting that it may sound at http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/styleguide/identity/firefox/channels/ with some reasoning behind some of the branding and colors chosen in the Mozilla creative palette.

Comment 29

[Jason Smith [:jsmith]]

Wouldn't we mark this as fixed if we we're sticking with it? Not a WONTFIX?

Comment 30

[David Bialer [:dbialer]]

You are right, as I'm new to the bugzilla process, not sure what the appropriate status should be.

We should keep this to fix in next push.  Rick has said not to spend any time on this, but I do think we should make it more readable as a point of quality for us.  However it shouldn't be a blocker.

The color will most likely stay the purple to keep branding happy.  I personally like the color, but don't see that as something we need to fret about as it is short term - until it is declared out of Aurora.

I would appreciate it if someone can update the status appropriately so I can learn the meanings.

Reopened, with a status of P2 (P3?) target of next push 10/25?  Guidance is much appreciated here.

Comment 31

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

This patch is already in to go out tomorrow.  If I'm understanding comment 30 correctly you're wanting it to stay in, and you also want to adjust the header again but you don't currently have new graphics.

I'm closing this bug since there isn't more dev work to do - if you get new graphics please open a new one.

Comment 32

[David Bialer [:dbialer]]

Yes.  Exactly.  Will hopefully get new graphics next week when branding people are back from an offsite.  Thanks.

Comment 33

[Victor Carciu]

Verified as fixed for now.

Comment 34

[Victor Carciu]

Attachment: Postfix screenshot