1172017 - Hello support - pointing users to a page to create links

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Karen Rudnitski [:kar]]

Fennec already allows users to accept Hello room links and therefore accept audio/video calls. This menu option would allow users to access the Hello portal in order to generate room links, and therefore generate a call. This would provide baseline Hello functionality within Fennec as a way of completing the product.

The portal work is being done outside of the Fennec team. The work needed here is to surface a menu option that users can access in order to generate (make) Hello calls. Would love for this to be in a build sooner rather than later (for l10n purposes) but then hidden behind a flag until we can confirm when the portal will be ready to go live.

Comment 1

[Karen Rudnitski [:kar]]

Need UX on this first (determine the most appropriate menu structure)

Comment 2

[:Margaret Leibovic]

antlam, what should this menu item say and where should it go?

Karen, do you have a URL that this item should point to?

Comment 3

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

the URL would really help me make an informed decision here so I'm going to wait for that.. Meanwhile, I'll ping UX in IRC to see if they can get me this link too

Comment 4

[Karen Rudnitski [:kar]]

Romain should be able to give us the URL to where the page will point to.

Comment 5

[Karen Rudnitski [:kar]]

Anthony, also ping Darrin - he would also be thinking about it, given his background in the Hello project.

Comment 6

[Romain Testard [:RT]]

I can only guess that it would be in the form of "https://hello.firefox.com/[generate]" but I NI Mark and Adam who can probably help clarify if we have constrainsts there.

https://hello.firefox.com/ points to the Firefox Hello product page already.

For context this is a web page where you can generate Hello URLs similar to https://talky.io/. Our initial way to support the creation of Hello URLs on Android will be through a link to that web page allowing to generate a URL and share it via Android intents.

We will want to create custom GA reports for users reaching that page from the Fennec menu option for analytics purposes - this may require the use of a URL parameter?

Comment 7

[Brad Lassey [:blassey] (use needinfo?)]

Karen, should this track a release?

Comment 8

[Karen Rudnitski [:kar]]

I would love to see this in 42.

Comment 9

[Adam Roach [:abr]]

(In reply to Romain Testard [:RT] from comment #6)
> I can only guess that it would be in the form of
> "https://hello.firefox.com/[generate]" but I NI Mark and Adam who can
> probably help clarify if we have constrainsts there.

Mark should confirm, but I don't think you're going to run into any issues here with your proposal.

Also, if we think it's best for UX, nothing prevents us from using https://hello.firefox.com/ for the link generation page (possibly with a "learn more" link that leads to the product page) -- the fact that it points to the product page right now is mostly to keep it from being "empty."

Comment 10

[Romain Testard [:RT]]

Agreed with Adam here - I NI Fabio to check if he sees any issues with us re-using https://hello.firefox.com/
I think ideally we should implement this in a way allowing us to remain flexible regarding the target URL - is this possible to just use a redirect URL to keep a level of flexibility here?

Comment 11

[Fabio Rios [:frios]]

Am I understanding correctly...

Are we saying the the mobile Firefox user will create room links using the same domain as desktop users-- hello.firefox.com? This makes sense, just need to make sure we can identify rooms created via mobile vs rooms created via desktop.

What's the deal with the redirect? I don't think the desktop link creator ever hits the URL, this should probably remain the same for mobile. We are using Google Analytics to measure visitors to hello.firefox.com which represents the link clicker. Pointing the link creator to this URL would probably affect those numbers. If that implementation is needed, just want to make sure Gareth is across it so he can identify how to segment out this incoming link-clicker traffic.

Comment 12

[Romain Testard [:RT]]

(In reply to Fabio Rios [:frios] from comment #11)
> Am I understanding correctly...
> 
> Are we saying the the mobile Firefox user will create room links using the
> same domain as desktop users-- hello.firefox.com? This makes sense, just
> need to make sure we can identify rooms created via mobile vs rooms created
> via desktop.

Sure, the reporting should handle this. I'll raise this on our weekly reporting session to check if we can break-down reporting related to mobile link generators VS desktop link generators.

> 
> What's the deal with the redirect? I don't think the desktop link creator
> ever hits the URL, this should probably remain the same for mobile. 

On Fennec the plan is to have a simple way to allow Fennec users to create Hello URLs by just exposing a link to a web page (redirect to https://hello.firefox.com/generate) where the Hello URL can be generated. The link to that web page would be accessible from within the Fennec chrome (menu option) so having a link that we can trust won't change and just redirects to a final destination is valuable.


We are
> using Google Analytics to measure visitors to hello.firefox.com which
> represents the link clicker. Pointing the link creator to this URL would
> probably affect those numbers. If that implementation is needed, just want
> to make sure Gareth is across it so he can identify how to segment out this
> incoming link-clicker traffic.

This should not be an issue (https://hello.firefox.com/NhmpOcpxq1c#sIb-4sk3-yqqGceC2DvSEw URL events should be reported separately from https://hello.firefox.com/generate URL events), Gareth will be part of the GA discussion for that "link generation" page.

Comment 13

[Fabio Rios [:frios]]

(In reply to Romain Testard [:RT] from comment #12)

Thanks Romain!

Comment 14

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

Talked to Sevaan, lets put this under Menu > Tools > "Firefox Hello"

Comment 15

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

Leaving a note here:

We also talked about possibly adding an option under "Send to other devices" (in the share menu) for "Start[ing] a conversation in Hello" that's typically based off links.

Comment 16

[Karen Rudnitski [:kar]]

Anthony - an interesting proposition for maybe down the line when we get more into the browser collaboration a bit deeper. I could see maybe wanting to send a link into a room (like as an IM into a room) as a way of easily sharing links to my room's participants, but would like to play that out (prototype it) a bit to see if it's useful.

Comment 17

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

We could quite easily host another page on hello.firefox.com I believe, although before making the final decision, it would be useful to know the content of that page, and expected rate of changes etc.

There's some advantages to hosting it on hello.firefox.com (e.g. the server interaction code will be in the same repo as the rest of our code), but if there's large amount of change, or large amount of text, it may be better to host on mozilla.org as that's may be more set up for it (I'm thinking L10n mainly).

Comment 18

[:Margaret Leibovic]

I can handle making this menu item.

Karen, is there a staging URL I can point to that we can use in Nightly?

Comment 19

[Karen Rudnitski [:kar]]

RT - can you help source a staging URL for testing?

Comment 20

[Romain Testard [:RT]]

(In reply to Karen Rudnitski [:kar] from comment #19)
> RT - can you help source a staging URL for testing?

Mark, is this something you'd handle or is it a server team activity?

Comment 21

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

I've created a page on our demo server:

https://loop-webapp-demo.stage.mozaws.net/create.html

I've not put anything in it, as we don't have anything yet. Is that enough for now?

Comment 22

[:Margaret Leibovic]

(In reply to Mark Banner (:standard8) from comment #21)
> I've created a page on our demo server:
> 
> https://loop-webapp-demo.stage.mozaws.net/create.html
> 
> I've not put anything in it, as we don't have anything yet. Is that enough
> for now?

Yes, that should be fine, thanks. I'll put the URL in a pref, so it will be easy to change in the future. I can also put the menuitem behind a pref if we don't want to expose this to all Nightly users just yet.

Comment 23

[:Margaret Leibovic]

I've been holding off on working on this, since it seems like our product/UX teams have still been talking about how we want to integrate Hello in Fennec.

Karen, should I still go ahead and try to make this menu item as an experiment? I'd like to try developing our Hello integration as an add-on, so this menuitem would be a pretty simple place to start with an add-on.

Comment 24

[Karen Rudnitski [:kar]]

Given we feel the add-on route is our best option for implementation, I think you can go ahead and definitely use this as a starting point. Do we need to modify the summary a bit?

Comment 25

[:Margaret Leibovic]

I built a simple add-on that adds a Menu > Tools > "Firefox Hello" menu item, which opens the demo server URL in a new tab.

https://github.com/leibovic/hello-android
http://people.mozilla.org/~mleibovic/hello.xpi

Eventually, we should figure out where this code can live in mozilla-central, but this should be good enough for development purposes.

Comment 26

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

Leaving this nom'd until we get a better release vehicle for the feature.

Comment 27

[:Margaret Leibovic]

Going to WONTFIX this. We can reopen or file a new bug if we ever decide to pursue Hello integration in Fennec.