1577463 - "Connect another device" dialog should offer non-telephone options

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Firefox Accounts, enhancement)

Description

[toni.schindler]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.14; rv:70.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/70.0

Steps to reproduce:

• click the Firefox account button (upper right)
• click "Connect Another Device..."

Actual results:

A phone number field is shown.

Expected results:

Different channels to connect a device should be offered, say, via e-mail.

Comment 1

[Vijay Budhram]

Hey Toni,

Thanks for the report. We currently don't offer an alternative on the connect another device screen. However, that screen does have an option to download from play store. Additional, when a user confirms their account, we send a post verification email with app store to download Firefox.

In an upcoming release, we will also offer users the ability to connect using a QR code.

I have cc :adavis and :wclouser from FxA to help triage the feature request.

Comment 2

[Alex Davis [:adavis]]

that screen does have an option to download from play store
There are 3 options on the page. Phone number, App Store and Play Store. After registration, we also include links by email.

SMS is just a way to facilitate things for users.

We can certainly investigate email as an option too in the future.

Comment 3

[toni.schindler]

When looking at the dialog I was not sure what information exactly would be sent by clicking "Send".

I was able to sign into the same account on different devices by following the normal steps (entering my email and password).
So, for one moment, when I first saw this dialog, I wondered whether this would be some mechanism to share key material with the other device, like for instance Enigmail/autocrypt does. But then I realized (heaving read about the implementation some time ago) that Firefox Account relies only on a password. Therefore I'm still wondering whether the only thing that's being sent is a link to the "sing into Firefox Account" dialog.

Therefore, as a first step, a short sentence mentioning what the "Send" button will actually send would be nice.

Maybe the relevant sentence is actually "Send Firefox directly...", which would imply that you only get a link to Firefox. If that were true I would feel slightly disappointed about having shared a telephone number for just a link to Firefox (after all, from any device, Firefox is easy to find). (By the way, I fully trust Mozilla to put their best effort into securing personal data, like phone numbers. The thing that I don't like in general is that "everybody" is asking for phone numbers those days, and that Mozilla is following the trend in this particular example.)

Comment 4

[Alex Davis [:adavis]]

You bring up some valid points and I can see how there is room for clarity in the copy.

Jeff & Feeley, any thoughts?

(also attaching a screenshot of current design/copy)

Comment 5

[Alex Davis [:adavis]]

Attachment: Screen Shot 2019-09-11 at 1.02.28 PM.png

Comment 6

[Ryan Feeley [:rfeeley]]

What about if the user can enter their phone number OR email address, and we send an email if that's what's entered.

Comment 7

[Alex Davis [:adavis]]

We've already acknowledged it's something we'll explore but until then, are there copy changes we can make to the existing experience to make it less confusing?

Comment 8

[Jeff Pfaller]

We could clarify by saying something like:

Download the app and sign in on your other devices...

or

Send an app link and sign in on your other devices...

Comment 9

[Ryan Feeley [:rfeeley]]

Attachment: hybrid.png

Something like this would be too strange? Seems simple to me. We don't have the email ready however.

Comment 10

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

We offer a QR code now. Closing this.