1351484 - UX support for refreshing the FxA devices list

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Firefox Accounts, enhancement)

Description

[:Grisha Kruglov]

Stemming from Bug 1351104, which aims to start using the FxA device list more broadly (as opposed to relying on the Sync Clients list), we'd like to add a broader support for "refresh the list of devices", to allow for a more predictable user experience.

Looking over the product, we're going to expose this list in multiple places (in lieu of the "clients list"):

1) History home panel -> Synced Devices
- "there are other clients" state, already has "pull-to-refresh"
- "there are no other clients" state, right now there's no pull-to-refresh and it displays an unhelpful "Welcome to Sync" message

2) Send Tab UIs:
 - overlay UI used on phones when sharing from within Fennec and from other apps.
 - pop-up UI used on tablets

3) FxA-served device management page, which is up-to-date at the time of loading and has a "Refresh" button

Case 1 already has partial support for refreshing the UI, and both 2 and 3 have no such support.

It would be great to gather UX feedback on how to best approach this (and ideally turn this into a meta bug). Additionally, it seems appropriate to consider this behaviour on other platforms (desktop & iOS).

Comment 1

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

Hey Grisha! 

Not sure I'm following but... if this a meta-bug about improving the Sync and device management experience on Mobile... some questions to help us move forward:

 - Can you define "broader support" for refresh the list of devices? I agree there's lots of things to fix, but I just want to make sure we're talking about the same things
 - When you say "predictable", what do you see as the main pain points that make it "not predictable" currently? 
 - Can you attach a screenshot of the current "list" you're referring to?

I think Product will also have some good ideas here too!

Comment 2

[:Grisha Kruglov]

(In reply to Anthony Lam (:antlam) from comment #1)
> Hey Grisha! 

Sup!

> Not sure I'm following but... if this a meta-bug about improving the Sync
> and device management experience on Mobile... 

This is specifically talking about device management on mobile, and how it relates to features such as Synced Devices and Send Tab To Device features.
 
>  - Can you define "broader support" for refresh the list of devices? I agree
> there's lots of things to fix, but I just want to make sure we're talking
> about the same things

Generally I want users to have ability to refresh this list whenever they encounter it _and_ might depend on its accuracy. As opposed to "see a list, depend on browser to keep it fresh, and we might get some timing wrong so that a device X they wanted isn't there and they can't do anything about it". 

>  - When you say "predictable", what do you see as the main pain points that
> make it "not predictable" currently? 

The above comment alludes to what I mean by predictable. We either depend on our internal logic to keep things fresh and accurate, OR in addition to that we also provide a simple "make sure it's up-to-date" mechanism. The predictability then becomes "whenever I try to use feature X that depends on this list, it's either fresh _or_ it's trivial to refresh it".

The non-predictable behaviour is the dependence on "did the internal magic work?" 

>  - Can you attach a screenshot of the current "list" you're referring to?

The "list" is a list of FxA devices under your account. We don't currently show it anywhere in fennec, other than on the Manage Account web content FxA page. The code to actually pull and store that list locally _just_ landed in Bug 1351805.

> I think Product will also have some good ideas here too!

Who will be the best person to ping about this? I'm getting confused with all of the recent changes :-)


Anthony, does the above make sense to you?

Comment 3

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

From our recent convos about UX/UI paper cuts, it sounds like this isn't high priority ATM. So I'm going to clear my NI for now. 

Please NI if this gets re-prioritized higher!

Comment 4

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