1409206 - Warn users about data merge at Sign-In If there is already data in their profile

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Sync, enhancement, P2)

Description

[Alex Davis [:adavis]]

This bug is hopefully a quick fix to a more complex problem.

If you sign-in to Sync on a device that already has data, we don't warn users that the data will merge. Some users expect a new profile to be created at login (quasi similarly to what Chrome does).

See
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1325271#c16

We currently display a merger warning if an account was previously signed-in to the same browser. I propose that we also warn them if the profile is not blank.

If the user chooses not to merge then I imagine Sync will remain disabled.

Comment 1

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

Might be worth filing separate bugs for iOS and Android.

Also worth figuring out exactly what "has data" means -- should we make an effort to try to ignore default or distro-supplied bookmarks, in order to not alarm users?

And the next concern: naïvely, this isn't an actionable warning. Sync 1.1 allowed you to choose whether to wipe the device, merge, or throw away the contents of the server. Sync itself still has these capabilities under the hood. But right now there's no way in iOS to delete all of your bookmarks, and Clear Private Data isn't all that discoverable. Can we do better?

Comment 2

[Julie McCracken (:julie)]

Please take a look at the UI for this, and consider writing a feature doc.

Comment 3

[Alex Davis [:adavis]]

Clearing ni? since I'm working on user switching which should cover this:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1smeS4qlXdmJ1EKcT_wbGhlN7FOipM4TAXum5pkuDy3c/edit#

Comment 9

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

Bug 1409208 is actionable now, but this bug requires UX before it is. Julie, can you please try and work out who we now go to for UX and see if they can help here?

Comment 10

[Julie McCracken (:julie)]

(In reply to Mark Hammond [:markh] from comment #9)
> Bug 1409208 is actionable now, but this bug requires UX before it is. Julie,
> can you please try and work out who we now go to for UX and see if they can
> help here?

I asked for UX help last week. The UX manager scheduled a meeting with me for Thursday (Australia time) to discuss. I'll make sure to cover this bug.

Comment 11

[Ryan Feeley [:rfeeley]]

For what it's worth, this request leaves me a little speechless. Users signing up for Sync should understand what Sync will do (upload their bookmarks to the server, and share them across devices). If this is a widespread problem, perhaps we should resolve it by improving the messages at the point of entry rather than adding an additional dialog during authentication.

Comment 12

[Alex Davis [:adavis]]

From meeting yesterday, this doesn't support Q2 OKRs so we'll put it on hold. We'll get some UX feedback so we can give clearly spec'd requirements to engineering for Q3.

Comment 13

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

Given the discussion above and the lack of clarify around it, I think we can just close this because we aren't going to do it,