1202091 - Search suggestions animate arbitrarily and look unpolished

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

STR:
* Click url bar
* Tap a
* Enable search suggestions if necessary

Tap a, wait, and observe for animations. Repeat a few times. Sometimes the view will animate downwards and sometimes it will not. It's arbitrary and it looks bad.

Anthony, what's the expected experience? Should the search suggestions only animate when they're initially shown?

Comment 1

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

Attachment: search_suggexpand_preload5.mov

Thank you for filing this Mike!

This is something we tried to improve in our Search Activity. I can't find the bug now but it was about improving perceived performance essentially. By loading "placeholders" that would animate in however we wanted, we could then take the time to just fade in the actual results.

I can see us employing a similar strategy here for these suggestion/history pills. I'd love to land this work too since it does feel REALLY rough at times.

Comment 2

[Prabhjyot Sodhi [:psd]]

Hey Michael, thanks for the bug suggestions!

I would love to take a stab at fixing this. This is new for me and I was hoping for some points on getting started! :)

Comment 3

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

in the meantime, let's try to smooth out this animation we currently have here and then we can file a follow up to change the animation later down the line.

Comment 4

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

(In reply to Michael Comella (:mcomella) from comment #0)
> Sometimes the view will animate downwards and sometimes it will not.

The animations occur when the search suggestions changes the number of rows it spans, e.g. there was one row of suggestions but now there are two because of overflow.

There is a smooth translation of many UI components, however, when the search engine favicon appears to start translating, it gets redrawn in weird places (like the top of the box) and causes a flicker.

I can repro on my GS5 and my N7, but antlam could not repro on his GS6.

Prabhjyot, can you repro this? It'll be helpful in order to fix the bug, which is to have the primary search favicon translate smoothly upward to compensate for the additional search engine suggestion rows.

(In reply to Prabhjyot Sodhi [:psd] from comment #2)
> I was hoping for some points on getting started! :)

Our search screen is BrowserSearch.java. BrowserSearch.SearchAdapter builds & constructs the search engine rows. That should get you started!

Disclaimer: rest could be wrong because I'm just looking briefly. I see the SearchAdapter constructs home_search_item_row.xml, which makes a SearchEngineRow. That sounds like where the search suggestions might be built. I'm not sure where the animation takes place.

Let me know if you need anything else, Prabhjyot!

Comment 5

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

(In reply to Anthony Lam (:antlam) from comment #1)
> By loading "placeholders" that would animate in however we wanted,

I filed bug 1206313 for the placeholders bug.

Comment 6

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

Reset assignee due to inactivity.

Comment 7

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

(In reply to Michael Comella (:mcomella) from comment #0)
> STR:
> * Click url bar
> * Tap a
> * Enable search suggestions if necessary
> 
> Tap a, wait, and observe for animations. Repeat a few times. Sometimes the
> view will animate downwards and sometimes it will not. It's arbitrary and it
> looks bad.
> 
> Anthony, what's the expected experience? Should the search suggestions only
> animate when they're initially shown?

I'm going to WONTFIX this bug and post the expected experience UX in bug 1206313 since thats the experience we want.