1412028 - Finish initial user request after enabling devtools if possible

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1519018

(DevTools :: General, enhancement, P3)

Description

[:Harald Kirschner :digitarald]

Right now the onboarding flow forgets what the user wanted to do, like opening the Console. It would be nice to bring the user back into the right tool that they wanted to open after the tools got installed; probably also on the right tab.

How far is that possible?

Comment 1

[Julian Descottes [:jdescottes]]

(In reply to :Harald Kirschner :digitarald from comment #0)
> Right now the onboarding flow forgets what the user wanted to do, like
> opening the Console. It would be nice to bring the user back into the right
> tool that they wanted to open after the tools got installed; probably also
> on the right tab.

Refocusing the correct tab should be fixed by Bug 1410360.

> 
> How far is that possible?

As long as the original tab can still be found, we can easily focus it, show the toolbox and select the right tool. When we discussed it initially for go-faster, we discarded this option because the onboarding flow is a significant (and normally rare) interruption.

I will do a patch and keep the behavior behind a pref so that everybody can test the behavior and see how it feels.

Comment 2

[Julian Descottes [:jdescottes]]

Attachment: Bug 1412028 - expose executeKey from devtools-startup;

In order to execute the initial user action after going through
the onboarding flow, devtools-startup should expose a method easy
to call from the outside to trigger a devtools "command".

For now this is limited to devtools keyshortcuts.

Review commit: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/194020/diff/#index_header
See other reviews: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/194020/

Comment 3

[Julian Descottes [:jdescottes]]

Attachment: Bug 1412028 - open toolbox after completing about:devtools;

Review commit: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/194022/diff/#index_header
See other reviews: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/194022/

Comment 4

[Julian Descottes [:jdescottes]]

Here's a first implementation that reapplies the key shortcut sent be the user. In the case of the "Inspect element" menu item, it simply opens the inspector. The system/hamburger menu entry points correspond to a click on "Enable DevTools..." so I don't think there is any action to forward here. Finally nothing for about:debugging at the moment but that's not the most urgent priority.

Feel free to have a look at the patches here. I think that having a button in the final page could work well with this : "Ok, take me back to my tab" or something similar?

Here I execute this behavior when the tab is closing, but we could make it more explicit with a button. This would also help the user understand that no further action is required from them.

Comment 5

[Victoria Wang [:victoria]]

Ah... I see the usefulness of a "Return to previous tab" button, but once we add the newsletter signup it would feel like there were competing calls-to-action. The ideal design here may be to separate out the newsletter signup into its own section. It kind of seems overly prominent in my current design anyway. This might be more design work than I can take on at the moment, however. Interested in hearing what Harald thinks.

As I mentioned in one of the other bugs, I still think opening DevTools for the user seems a bit too abrupt/surprising. Even with Inspect Element, which is a very specific action that makes me feel like the user's work is unfortunately lost in due to the GoFaster flow, I feel like the install process is context-switching enough that the user would want to Inspect Element on their own once the tools are installed.

Comment 6

[:Harald Kirschner :digitarald]

I wasn’t aware of the secondary call to action on the installation-complete page; I should probably spend some time with Victoria on a complete walk through to understand all the thinking that went into the planning so far.

I’d like to challenge the newsletter sign up, as we don’t have it build in ATM and replace the idea with a push notifications. I have to validate that marketing can handle this as a channel to some degree but I am convinced newsletters are not as good as in-browser notifications to capture developers’ attention.

Comment 7

[:Harald Kirschner :digitarald]

Lets simplify this for now and not try to complete the flow that the user initially started.

Separate from this specific issue: For the newsletter signup, we can keep that in the flow for the experiment and measure how many people actually sign up to make a decision to keep it.