Closed Bug 1400836 Opened 7 years ago Closed 4 years ago

[Activity Stream][UX] - Make mobile Top Sites follow desktop's tile selection rules (e.g. only one page per subdomain.domain)

Categories

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Activity Stream, enhancement, P3)

57 Branch
ARM
Android
enhancement

Tracking

(fennec+, firefox57 affected)

RESOLVED INCOMPLETE
Tracking Status
fennec + ---
firefox57 --- affected

People

(Reporter: bsurd, Unassigned)

References

Details

(Whiteboard: [mobileAS])

Hello, Mobile version of Top Sites rules should follow desktop version of Top Sites rules. On desktop the Top Sites use the high level domain for a website. And only specific links that are visited several times appear in Top Sites. This is a really good improvement since it would make Top Sites look cleaner without having several for eg. wiki pages (or only wiki pages) in Top Sites. Instead all of the wiki pages will be replaced with the high level domain only thus having only one top site linking to wiki A user always has the possibility to bookmark all of the items he is interested in on a specific site. This is open for discussion, but desktop implementation makes much more sense and should be applied to all mobile versions of FF.
I voiced some history and my opinion during triage (copied below) but this could use a larger discussion. (In reply to Bogdan Surd, QA [:BogdanS] from comment #0) > This is open for discussion, but desktop implementation makes much more > sense and should be applied to all mobile versions of FF. To preface, I think it would be ideal for the UX of both desktop and mobile to come together to figure out what is best for each platform rather than engineering following desktop's model. Each platform is different, and its users have their own needs, so it'd be great if we could run a mobile user study to understand what the needs are of top sites for mobile users and how that should relate to the desktop implementation. --- Let's address the details: > And only specific links that are visited several times appear in Top Sites. I agree – I think it looks unpolished that Top Sites, in a new profile, will display links you've only visited once because the user doesn't have other visited sites to take higher precedence over them. > On desktop the Top Sites use the high level domain for a website. > > This is a really good improvement since it would make Top Sites look cleaner > without having several for eg. wiki pages (or only wiki pages) in Top Sites. > Instead all of the wiki pages will be replaced with the high level domain > only thus having only one top site linking to wiki In my understanding, "high level domain" would be when we label a site by "subdomain.domain". While this makes the UI look cleaner, I'm concerned that it won't fit the use case of users. For example, if a user intentionally uses the browser to primarily visit multiple pages of the same site (a single site has the same "subdomain.domain"), e.g. for myself: - https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-android - https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-ios However, with the desktop algorithm, we wouldn't display both pages even though I visit them both frequently and use them both rather equally. Another example could be the pages of a weather website. As such, I questioned whether the desktop algorithm was really better for users and, after discussing with bbell, I chose not to change the Android algorithm. That being said, we had to make several changes in our UI to adapt for having more than one page per "subdomain.domain", e.g. bug 1390372 where we display page titles for any URLs that contain a path and "subdomain.domain" if there is no path. > A user always has the possibility to bookmark all of the items he is > interested in on a specific site. Additionally, a user can now pin whatever sites they want to top sites (after bug 1398834). I didn't consider bookmarks but it is true that a user could use this as a work-around, but the bookmarks UI 1) does not create entries automatically and 2) in it pages are less easily accessible than they are in the top sites UI.
Summary: [Activity Stream] - Make mobile Top Sites follow desktop version rules → [Activity Stream] - Make mobile Top Sites follow desktop's tile selection rules (e.g. only one page per subdomain.domain)
Whiteboard: [mobileAS]
tracking-fennec: --- → ?
(In reply to Michael Comella (:mcomella) from comment #1) > (In reply to Bogdan Surd, QA [:BogdanS] from comment #0) > > This is open for discussion, but desktop implementation makes much more > > sense and should be applied to all mobile versions of FF. > > To preface, I think it would be ideal for the UX of both desktop and mobile > to come together to figure out what is best for each platform rather than > engineering following desktop's model. > > Each platform is different, and its users have their own needs, so it'd be > great if we could run a mobile user study to understand what the needs are > of top sites for mobile users and how that should relate to the desktop > implementation. Maria agreed with my summarization of this statement in triage so it's not something we can really fix before release. NI self to follow-up with documentation on my previous discussion & decision to not fix this sooner in the cycle.
tracking-fennec: ? → +
Flags: needinfo?(michael.l.comella)
Priority: -- → P3
> NI self to follow-up with documentation on my previous discussion & decision > to not fix this sooner in the cycle. To summarize, I was championing not changing the algorithm to be similar to desktop because I wasn't convinced it was better and after speaking with bbell, he didn't feel it was important enough for me to change the algorithm. After the fact, I came to my conclusion that we should be looking at the bigger picture, with user research, to decide how these algorithms should work on each platform individually. Here are the details: --- I came upon this work while copying the top sites labels from iOS & desktop (bug 1377287 -> bug 1382036 -> bug 1386902). I noticed that there were edge cases that I saw on mobile that I didn't see on desktop: there are multiple tiles with the same name (bug 1382332). After trying a few different naming algorithms to dedupe sites, I realized I could change the algorithm to fix the problem: (In reply to Michael Comella (:mcomella) from bug 1382332 comment #25) > To summarize the consequences of comment 23, I think there are two variables > we can tweak are: > > 1) Revise the UI to help distinguish multiple sites with same host (e.g. > allow titles to take up multiple lines only if there is another top site > with the same host) > > 2) Change the top sites algorithm so we have fewer sites with the same host. > > In my opinion, I think we should focus on #1: afaik, there's been no desire > to modify our existing top sites query so it's probably pretty good (caveat: > users used to be able to enter custom sites). The approach of limiting the > number of same-host sites that appear in our top sites doesn't seem to be a > better user experience to me (e.g. if I use my browser primarily to look at > github; and how my top sites on desktop doesn't seem to accurately represent > my browser usage). I spoke with bbell about this on Vidyo but unfortunately didn't document this discussion. iirc: - The context: this conversation was in the context of fixing the labeling issues 1-by-1 and I wasn't in the mindset of taking a step back to look at the bigger picture. I was also still trying to understand the consequences of the existing algorithm and the consequences of desktop's implementation - Not necessarily better: I mentioned the desktop algorithm, which limits the number of tiles per site to 1, is not necessarily better than the mobile algorithm (e.g. as I mention in comment 1; users also filed bugs for this issue with subreddits (bug 1388595) and weather pages (bug 1385651); also, we've gotten kudos for the Android top sites implementation in the past) - Unclear edge cases: he emphasized that top sites should heavily weight top level domains and highlights should heavily weight pages. That didn't seem entirely correct to me: what about repository pages on github? There were other similar edge case issues. - More challenging to code: I mentioned that it was non-trivial to try to update the algorithm, especially when the desired UX was unclear I documented the UX change required as a result of the decision to keep the algorithm: (In reply to Michael Comella (:mcomella) from bug 1382332 comment #40) > To follow up on comment 25, spoke with bbell: we're going to try using > "subdomain.domain" when the page does not have a path and use the page title > when the page has a path. > > fwiw, he mentioned nchapman has some code that will extract the more > relevant parts out of a url (e.g. would pull out the Bug # for Bugzilla) but > we haven't had a chance to talk to him and to me it sounds like a heuristic > rabbit hole so we'll try ^ first. After this, I filed bug 1390372 for the page title issue.
Flags: needinfo?(michael.l.comella)
All open Activity Stream bugs are moving from the whiteboard tag, "[mobileAS]", to the Firefox for Android component, "Activity Stream", so that I can keep better track of these bugs as the new triage owner; I will send out an email shortly with additional details, caveats, etc.
Component: Theme and Visual Design → Activity Stream
As per comment 1, this will likely require UX to take a comprehensive look at.
Summary: [Activity Stream] - Make mobile Top Sites follow desktop's tile selection rules (e.g. only one page per subdomain.domain) → [Activity Stream][UX] - Make mobile Top Sites follow desktop's tile selection rules (e.g. only one page per subdomain.domain)
We have completed our launch of our new Firefox on Android. The development of the new versions use GitHub for issue tracking. If the bug report still reproduces in a current version of [Firefox on Android nightly](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix) an issue can be reported at the [Fenix GitHub project](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/). If you want to discuss your report please use [Mozilla's chat](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix#Connect_to_Matrix) server https://chat.mozilla.org and join the [#fenix](https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fenix:mozilla.org) channel.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 4 years ago
Resolution: --- → INCOMPLETE
Product: Firefox for Android → Firefox for Android Graveyard
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