1206155 - Trigger home page without cluttering up the existing chrome / UX of about:home

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Barbara Bermes [:barbara] - NI please!]

We need to find a way to allow the user to trigger / go to the home page and not only through starting the browser.

Some options
- Open new tab (similar to desktop)
- Part of Top Sites? 
- New Panel?
etc.

Comment 1

[:Margaret Leibovic]

(In reply to Barbara Bermes [:barbara] from comment #0)
> We need to find a way to allow the user to trigger / go to the home page and
> not only through starting the browser.
> 
> Some options
> - Open new tab (similar to desktop)

How does this work on desktop? I thought that the home page on desktop only showed up when you open a new window, or hit the home button in the toolbar. Maybe we could make a setting to always load your homepage in new tabs, but I don't know if users would always want that.

> - Part of Top Sites? 

We could pin it as a top site.

Comment 2

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

(In reply to :Margaret Leibovic from comment #1)
> (In reply to Barbara Bermes [:barbara] from comment #0)
> > We need to find a way to allow the user to trigger / go to the home page and
> > not only through starting the browser.
> > 
> > Some options
> > - Open new tab (similar to desktop)
> 
> How does this work on desktop? I thought that the home page on desktop only
> showed up when you open a new window, or hit the home button in the toolbar.
> Maybe we could make a setting to always load your homepage in new tabs, but
> I don't know if users would always want that.

Agreed. Showing the homepage when adding a new tab is not right.

> 
> > - Part of Top Sites? 
> 
> We could pin it as a top site.

Also agreed. We already have a mechanism for pinning favorite web sites to Top Sites. Let's auto-pin (or offer to pin) when setting the homepage in Settings.

Comment 3

[Barbara Bermes [:barbara] - NI please!]

Karen, Anthony and myself just met (Martyn couldn't attend).

Here is our suggested plan of action:

Fact: we have a lot of users asking for this feature, some even suggest "open in new tab", even if we know and feel this could affect performance, we want to give users what they want (opt-in only behind pref). The only question is how they want it, hence the following will happen

a) Anthony to mock up another option, e.g. floating icon to access home page
b) create prototypes for both options "New tab" and a)
c) Gemma to do userstesting.com on prototypes
d) Review results

----------
Here all the public posts related to the feature

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1083751 - September 14, 2015
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1082895 - September 9,
2015
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1081918 - September 3, 2015
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1081346 - August 31, 2015
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1079501 - August 22, 2015
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1078451  - August 17, 2015
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1073451 - July 21, 2015
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1071719 - July 12, 2015
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1071551 - July 10, 2015
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1068877 - June 24, 2015
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1068251  - June 21, 2015
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1066670 - June 11, 2015
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1060947 - May 7, 2015
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1060271 - May 2, 2015
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1060239 - May 2, 2015
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1060238 - May 2, 2015
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1058005 - April 17, 2015
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1057490 - April 14, 2015
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1055576 - April 3, 2015
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1054444 - March 28, 2015

Comment 4

[:Margaret Leibovic]

(In reply to Barbara Bermes [:barbara] from comment #3)
> Karen, Anthony and myself just met (Martyn couldn't attend).
> 
> Here is our suggested plan of action:
> 
> Fact: we have a lot of users asking for this feature, some even suggest
> "open in new tab", even if we know and feel this could affect performance,
> we want to give users what they want (opt-in only behind pref). The only
> question is how they want it, hence the following will happen
> 
> a) Anthony to mock up another option, e.g. floating icon to access home page
> b) create prototypes for both options "New tab" and a)
> c) Gemma to do userstesting.com on prototypes
> d) Review results

This sounds fine to me. My main concern is that we don't spend too much time an effort iterating on prototypes before getting them in front of users, so let's just make sure they're very well scoped (it sounds like they are).

Comment 5

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

(In reply to :Margaret Leibovic from comment #4)
> (In reply to Barbara Bermes [:barbara] from comment #3)
> > Karen, Anthony and myself just met (Martyn couldn't attend).
> > 
> > Here is our suggested plan of action:
> > 
> > Fact: we have a lot of users asking for this feature, some even suggest
> > "open in new tab", even if we know and feel this could affect performance,
> > we want to give users what they want (opt-in only behind pref). The only
> > question is how they want it, hence the following will happen
> > 
> > a) Anthony to mock up another option, e.g. floating icon to access home page
> > b) create prototypes for both options "New tab" and a)
> > c) Gemma to do userstesting.com on prototypes
> > d) Review results
> 
> This sounds fine to me. My main concern is that we don't spend too much time
> an effort iterating on prototypes before getting them in front of users, so
> let's just make sure they're very well scoped (it sounds like they are).

I assume we are talking about a Material design style floating button? That seems worth exploring, add is more simple than pinning the home page as a Top Site (bug 1206627).

Comment 6

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

Renaming to be more accurate

Comment 7

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

Attachment: Screen Shot 2015-09-25 at 2.49.30 PM.png

WIP screenshot. Still need some time to noodle on the specifics of the design. 

This definitely is a better way to add a "homepage access point" to the about:home screen. But my assumption here is that this is what users are asking for. 

We may well discover (down the line) that users want to be able to access their homepage while they're on _any_ site. I.e. they don't want to have to start a new tab each time. Then, we might have to revisit this UX.

Looking to Barbara here for some feedback and decisions about next steps. Barbara, we talked about testing in regards to bug 1206627 but I think this UX would be a better alternative to solving the same issue. I.e. this is better than "pinning". The user still has to trigger about:home first if they want to access their set Home page either way.

Perhaps the thing we need to figure out now is if "easy access" to their homepage is "easy enough" if it's in about:home. The user will need to go to about:home first. So, if that does not meet the users' requirements, maybe we need to look at another "access point" for this shortcut.

So, I'd like to determine what 'want' we're trying to solve for.

Martyn:

Worth noting that according to guidelines for the FAB[1] (and I agree in this case), we would need to animate this off screen (shrink it until it disappears) as the user swipes away from their default home panel. If they scroll about:home, or tap the URL bar to trigger about:home, I want to see if these [2] transitions are possible with our current implementation. Because having a round button on top of a keyboard is awkward.

[1] https://www.google.com/design/spec/components/buttons-floating-action-button.html#buttons-floating-action-button-behavior

[2] https://www.google.com/design/spec/components/buttons-floating-action-button.html#buttons-floating-action-button-transitions

Comment 8

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

NI-ing for context/WIP mocks

Comment 9

[Barbara Bermes [:barbara] - NI please!]

Discussed with antlam, kar and margaret yesterday to use the "open in new tab" approach because
a) suggested by many users (let's give our users what they want) 
b) for other distribution setups
c) because stock browsers behave the same and that's what users expect when moving to FF

Let's put this behind a nightly flag, test it with current disable home page approach (just put blank in), and decide based on feedback if we should come up with a dedicated "disable" home page button, as well as the opt-in/out for "open new tab".

Comment 10

[:Margaret Leibovic]

Let's use bug 1206155 to add an option to setting to open the home page on new tabs.

With that change, I don't think there's anything left to do here right now, so I'm going to close out this bug.