1106237 - Add simple UI to allow users to opt-out of particular snippet campaigns

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Snippets Graveyard :: General, enhancement)

Description

[[:philipp]]

nearly every major visual change of about:home through a snippet campaign triggers quite a lot of negative feedback on the sumo forums by users, some also irritated if the changes are genuine. at the moment there is no better option than to recommend to those users to set a different homepage or to set browser.aboutHomeSnippets.updateUrl to blank and to clear the storage in the profile folder (probably something that is too difficult for most users anyway).
both those options are probably having a negative long-term effect: we are no longer able to reach them with snippets in the future & the first option will also lead to lost search traffic.

therefore i would suggest that snippet campaigns which change the homepage design significantly include a simple opt-out option (like a subtle x on the top right of the logo area) that allows users to return to the normal homepage design for the time that the particular campaign in ongoing.

Comment 1

[Osmose [:osmose, :mkelly]]

From a technical standpoint this is possible (we can store a blacklist of snippet IDs in IndexedDB on the client side and take that into account when showing the user snippets). 

The UX of how they express that they don't want to see a snippet is a little funky: What if a snippet doesn't have any text or icon below the search bar, but instead just replaces the logo? What if the snippet is a video below the search bar? And so on, we'd want to do this in a generic way that works regardless of the snippet. Also, the feature would need at least one string explaining what it does, but snippets isn't currently set up to do that type of l10n (it could be, not a blocker, just another thing that would need to happen to make this work).

Either way, I kinda like this idea myself. Fabio, you have any thoughts?

Comment 2

[Fabio Rios [:frios]]

Philip, this is good information. I'd like to know more about this negative feedback. Do we have data or is it simply in comment form? We deliver millions of impressions per day, can we see number of negative comments? Very important to be able to quantify before developing this option. 

Easy opt-out can lead to more than just those few users ditching the message. We really want users to see this stuff. If our messages are failing, that's a whole different problem.

I'm more interested in how we can deliver relevant content than allowing them to opt out of the snippet completely. I need to think about that a bit more. Perhaps replacing an irrelevant snippet with another? Rotating snippets?. Thinking out loud here...

Comment 3

[Osmose [:osmose, :mkelly]]

Oh, whoops, I had meant to add to my last comment that I like this idea as it relates to the manifesto: "Individuals must have the ability to shape the Internet and their own experiences on the Internet." I like adding choice to about:home, especially at a granular level like this that lets users opt out of a specific animation but still use about:home if they wish.

Comment 4

[[:philipp]]

hi fabio, it's not possible to quantify the issue based just on the number of questions on sumo (only a tiny subset of users with a problem will ever post about it in the forum). what's a bit worrying is that it is a recurring sentiment after each visual change of the logo area - this has been pretty much the same for different campaigns (firefox android promotion, fx os, webwewant, #fx10), so i think this cannot be tied to the relevancy of content but more to the way how it is presented.
this search covers some threads about the issue and should give an impression of the sentiment of some of the users in regards to the issue: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/search/advanced?num_voted=0&a=1&updated=0&created=0&q=%22moz-safe-about%2Bhome%22&sortby=0&w=2

maybe another way to approach the issue is to not offer a total opt-out of a particular campaign but to have a less visually distracting backup snippet available:
-so when people x out the logo, the homepage would go back to showing the common firefox brand, but the snippet container could still contain the messaging of the campaign.
-another option would be to change the appearance back to "normal" once users interact with content (so for example based on the current #fx10 video campaign return to the normal firefox brand once a user has watched the clip & only offer to rewatch the promo video in the snippets container area). this could probably also be used for other purposes like to show a "thank you"-message to users who donated through a snippets campaign...

Comment 5

[Fabio Rios [:frios]]

Philip, thanks for sharing the link. I read through many of the pages and can see some trends. There's definitely more buzz around specific snippets, that's really important to see. 

There are things we can do to alleviate the pains for some users. In fact, there are some things we can do that don't require development such as not keeping the same snippet up for too long. It's useful information for me as I'm mapping out new snippets. 

In terms of development, I'd like to think this through a bit further. I like the idea about changing/removing a snippet that a user has already interacted with. I've added this to our development road map so we can discuss the feasibility/implementation.

Thanks again Philip, marking this one as resolved.

Comment 6

[[:philipp]]

just as a follow-up: the current foxyeah campaign once again lead some users to inquire how to turn off that snippet (maybe animation is too distracting for some users). i will tag such threads at sumo, when i notice them: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/firefox?tagged=bug1106237&show=all