1054915 - Having multiple 'Send to' icons a confusing UX

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Screencasting, defect)

Description

[Karen Rudnitski [:kar]]

Attachment: Screenshot_2014-08-18-09-40-46.png

As a user, I find it confusing if there are multiple videos on a page (like on http://people.mozilla.org/~mfinkle/casting/test.html) and I have an icon in the URL bar (that does nothing when I tap on it) and an icon for the video itself (which does work). This may only happen when there are multiple videos available to play on a single page, at which point I would like a dialogue telling me to choose a video. If there's only one video on the page, I would expect it to 'know' this and start streaming it. 

On a roku 3 with the latest nightly.

Comment 1

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Just a note: These icons do different things.

1. The icon in the URLBar ONLY appears when a castable video is playing.
2. The cast icon in the video element controls ONLY shows up if we think we can play the video, but the video does not need to be playing.

#1 exists because #2 is hidden by web sites for the majority of video web sites. The HTML5 spec allows web sites to hide or re-create the video controls.

#1 exists only when a video is playing because we are much more confident in the state of the video once it's playing. Many web sites do not create a video element until the user asks to play the video. Before that point, it's just an image that looks like a video. It's a fake.

#1 exists because it's the easiest way to let the user pick a video to cast, when there are more than one video on the page. As stated above, we don't even know how many videos are on a page because the web site likely uses images, not videos, until the users plays a video.

If all this is too confusing, we could rollback the UI to this: Never show a casting icon in the video controls or the URLBar (already works) until a video on the page is actually playing.

Comment 2

[Paul [pwd]]

I agree that an unclickable cast icon in the awesomebar is confusing. Especially given that everything that appears in that space is normally clickable.

Comment 3

[Karen Rudnitski [:kar]]

Ok, I understand the rationale. 

To recap (and also provide suggestions):

1. The intention is that the icon appears when a castable video is playing. 

It seems (at least on cnn.com) that it appears only after I start laying a video AND THEN hit the 'send to' icon after tapping on the video AGAIN. So for this idea to hold true (and I like this idea), then the 'send to' icon needs to appear in the URL bar after the video starts playing. Not sure if it's another bug, but there seems to be two additional taps before that icon appears in the URL bar (video starts playing after I tap 'play', then the video controls disappear, then I have to tap on the playing video again to make the controls appear again, and then I tap on the 'send to' icon in the video controls, and THEN the icon in the URL bar appears). 

2. The icon in the video controls appear, but only after I have told it to play, controls disappear, and I tap on the video again (as described above). For this to be effective, can we show the icon in the controls after I have hit play and BEFORE the controls disappear? Otherwise no one is really going to know it's a castable video.

I'll log another bug on the interaction of tapping the URL icon as again, I'm not sure if there's just a bug of whether it's by design.

Comment 4

[Anthony Lam (:antlam) Find me, @antlam on Slack!]

Attachment: Screen Shot 2014-08-19 at 5.04.55 PM.png

It might also be confusing because (from looking at some "casting icon" files) the icons themselves are only mildly different from one another. 

#2 that Mark outlines is actually a "something is casting" icon, I believe.

But yes, I agree, after briefly testing it, I'm not sure if some of the weirdness in the interactions are bugs or intended behavior. 

Will continue to test on it tomorrow and follow up. But it sounds like if most sites hide the cast icon that exists on top of the video element, the toolbar one is still necessary - particularly if that's where users are accustomed to looking for those types of indicators/feedback.

+ 2 cents :P

Comment 5

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

I'm WONTFIXing. We have not had any complaints or confusion reported.