Open Bug 1382532 Opened 7 years ago Updated 2 years ago

Investigate merging "Bookmarks Menu" with "Other Bookmarks"?

Categories

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect, P3)

Product:
Firefox
Component:
Bookmarks & History
Version:
54 Branch
Type:
defect

Tracking

()

Tracking Flags:
Tracking Status
firefox57 --- wontfix

People

(Reporter: orschiro, Unassigned)

References

Details

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:54.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/54.0
Build ID: 20170713134507

Steps to reproduce:

Does it make sense to have this separation? Wouldn't those two "folders" suffice:

1. Bookmarks Toolbar
2. Other Bookmarks

What is the added value of this separation? I as a new user was rather confused and found the bookmarks structure very difficult to navigate with.


Actual results:

-


Expected results:

-
Component: Untriaged → Bookmarks & History
Flags: needinfo?(mverdi)
I don't know all of the plans around bookmarks and Photon. Looking in Nightly right now I see a giant list of "recently bookmarked" stuff under bookmarks in the library panel. If I customize in the bookmarks menu I see the traditional bookmarks menu content. If that is sticking around then it probably makes sense to keep the Bookmarks Menu folder. Let's NI Aaron Benson since I think he's working on this part of Photon.
Flags: needinfo?(mverdi) → needinfo?(abenson)
My only concern is that for new users, it can be quite confusing as to how and where to store bookmarks in Firefox. In the end, many users don't really care about folders (my assumption). 

They just want to "star" a website and easily find it back later by typing into the URL bar what they recall from that website.

Hence, does the normal user require all this bookmarking (infra)structure?

Just putting this out for discussion.
Bookmarks need a redesign from a looooong time, the whole complication of having 3 or more roots was a nonsense from the beginning, and changing it now is non trivial. But for sure the situation is not ok.
Thanks, Marco. I am glad it's being recognized as such and I can imagine the complexity behind the scenes. Thus, not sure how to proceed from here.
As usual: we should start by having a UX proposal, discussing it with engineering, and converging towards an actionable one.
Marco, it would actually be nice to know the percentages of users using "Bookmarks Toolbar", "Bookmarks Menu", and "Other Bookmarks". Are there any statistics? If not, maybe run a poll among FF users to find that out?
yes, currently we don't have such detailed telemetry, so a good first step may be to add that.
I think in the past there have been user studies about bookmarking too, and that data is likely somewhere in UR team reach.
> yes, currently we don't have such detailed telemetry, so a good first step may be to add that.

Cool, how? :-)

> I think in the past there have been user studies about bookmarking too, and that data is likely somewhere in UR team reach.

Can we add those people to this bug ticket?
(In reply to Robert Orzanna from comment #8)
> > yes, currently we don't have such detailed telemetry, so a good first step may be to add that.
> 
> Cool, how? :-)

I suppose by adding the appropriate telemetry probes. That requires first understanding which measurement would bring to the best understanding while also preserving users' privacy.
The problem is that all the teams are busy with Release 57 (Quantum Flow and Photon projects), thus it's unlikely anyone internally may have time for this until October.

> > I think in the past there have been user studies about bookmarking too, and that data is likely somewhere in UR team reach.
> 
> Can we add those people to this bug ticket?

Yes, adding Bill.
> The problem is that all the teams are busy with Release 57 (Quantum Flow and Photon projects), thus it's unlikely anyone internally may have time for this until October.

I don't think that's a big issue as it is not a bug or anything terribly severe. Thanks for the discussion though!
We have not studied how many users use folders to organize bookmarks. Telemetry could tell us more about how many. It's important to know how many, but that shouldn't be the sole criteria for a feature.

As with most features, behavior around bookmarks is complex. With regard to the assumption that "many users don't really care about folders," we can't really say if that's accurate or not. Based on field work we have conducted as part of the workflows research that participants who do organize their bookmarks into folders do so deliberately and with purpose. Some of these users put great effort into organizing these folders. For these users, folder organization is very important to them. 

What perceived problem are we trying to solve? Is it: creating useful defaults to encourage users to organize bookmarks in folders? If so, I agree the current defaults are not very helpful or encouraging. There are other defaults we could use to organize the defaults, perhaps based on what real users are doing. However, I strongly suspect based on previous field work we have conducted that these organizational patterns will be culturally-specific to different locales.
(In reply to Bill Selman from comment #11)
> We have not studied how many users use folders to organize bookmarks.
> Telemetry could tell us more about how many. It's important to know how
> many, but that shouldn't be the sole criteria for a feature.

I think the discussion is not strictly about organizing into folders, but how much the current ROOTS structure helps users vs fighting them.
By that I mean the separation of bookmarks between MENU / TOOLBAR / UNFILED, vs having a single root, and maybe a folder indicated as "this is the toolbar". Or even just a single destination that doesn't matter if it's a menu or a toolbar and the user could decide in the UI how to present its contents (either as a toolbar or as a menu or as a sidebar).

The fact is I highly doubt most of the users can really understand that separation into main buckets, and even where the bookmarks end up being created (let alone understanding that starring creates a bookmark in unfiled that then one may move to a menu or toolbar).
> vs having a single root, and maybe a folder indicated as "this is the toolbar".

And if people are still given the option to expand upon this single root with subfolders, they can easily rebuild today's structure if they want to but they are not forced to use it. 

I think starting with a single root "Bookmarks" and within that one subfolder "Toolbar" would already be a great simplification.

Now wondering, how does Chrome solve this?
The long term plan is to build out the Library as the main point of recovery for your bookmarks. We kind of needed to keep the "old" bookmarks menu around so we didn't break the user experience for those that customized the bookmarks menu into their toolbar and upgrade to 57.

Also, if I'm understanding the conversation here, there's another issue about how we save bookmarks (in a root or in a folder, somewhere). I think that's a separate discussion but generally think bookmarks should stay un-filed unless the user has explicitly tagged them or placed in a folder.
Flags: needinfo?(abenson)
What is the use case for having "Other Bookmarks"? I actually think it should be removed altogether ...

Why not just create new bookmarks in "Bookmarks Menu", to keep it simple, and only have these two folders available?

Bookmarks Menu (default for new bookmarks)
Bookmarks Toolbar
(In reply to resa from comment #15)
> What is the use case for having "Other Bookmarks"? I actually think it
> should be removed altogether ...
> 
> Why not just create new bookmarks in "Bookmarks Menu", to keep it simple,
> and only have these two folders available?
> 
> Bookmarks Menu (default for new bookmarks)
> Bookmarks Toolbar

Keep the bookmark menu neat and fast (like bug 1306105) for the moment.
Thanks for leaving a comment, but I am not sure I understand what you mean... Would you care to elaborate?
(In reply to resa from comment #17)
> Thanks for leaving a comment, but I am not sure I understand what you
> mean... Would you care to elaborate?

Users who use the Bookmarks menu may not want it to become cluttered and tardy due to default save location, so we have "Unsorted Bookmarks" folder, then bug 1257599.
(In reply to YF (Yang) from comment #18)
> (In reply to resa from comment #17)
> > Thanks for leaving a comment, but I am not sure I understand what you
> > mean... Would you care to elaborate?
> 
> Users who use the Bookmarks menu may not want it to become cluttered and
> tardy due to default save location, so we have "Unsorted Bookmarks" folder,
> then bug 1257599.

Thanks for clarifying your thoughts. But can't people just create a new folder themselves, where they can dump their miscellaneous bookmarks? Why does it have to be forced onto every user? At least, I think it should be possible to disable "Other Bookmarks".
See Also: → 868664
This involves major UX discussion, but it's worth tracking, provided we don't yet know what we'll do.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
Priority: -- → P3
Summary: Merging "Bookmarks Menu" with "Other Bookmarks"? → Investigate merging "Bookmarks Menu" with "Other Bookmarks"?

Hi, Just wondering if any new discussions/solutions were decided upon to solve this?

Flags: needinfo?(mak)

Not for now, these are long term things that require resourcing first.

Flags: needinfo?(mak)
Severity: normal → S3
Duplicate of this bug: 1820564
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