1740705 - Improve visual feedback for adding a download to existing in-progress list of downloads

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Downloads Panel, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Adrian Florinescu [:aflorinescu]]

[Description:]

Given bug 1731110 and additionally the proposed bug 1738372 will reduce the download panel interaction even further.
For the current behavior with already existing download undergoing and excluding the case in which additional confirmations arise (e.g. ask to save), it seems to me like we are in need to underline the action feedback component of adding a new download to the existing ongoing downloads: the download progress icon refresh doesn't seem to be enough.

[Environment:]

Windows 10
Mac 11.0.4

[Steps:]

1. Open a Nightly 96 - lets assume new profile for simplicity
2. Click on download_ubuntu
3. Click again on download_ubuntu

[Actual Result:]

Currently, the first download will show the download panel and while in progress, the subsequent only feedback that a download has started is the download icon animation, which is in a sense easy to miss when you are triggering the download from inpage and it gets difficult to acknowledge when your focus is not 100% there to catch the animation.
It has happened to me at least a few times where I would open the download panel to check if the right download has actually started.

[Expected Result:]

I'm uncertain what would be the best approach to improve this.

Off the top of my head(not really happy with the ideas), I'm thinking:
1. having an incremental indicator in case of multiple downloads would solve the issue, if I get 3 downloads ongoing then the download progress should show something like 3, then the next download start would increment that to 4, which would revert to the no activity download icon when all is finished.
2. have an additional animation (originating from the download point?) that indicates a new download has been started/added

Comment 1

[Adrian Florinescu [:aflorinescu]]

:gijs, is there any reason why the download piechart indicator is per download and not for the composit sum ? (e.g. if I have 10 downloads ongoing you'd have no chances to know which download the piechart is shown for). Wouldn't be something a bit more intuitive to show the composite download progress or some UX change to solve them both (download_start_feedback + a relevant piechart proogress indicator)?

Ignore the above, it behaves as expected.

Comment 2

[Adrian Florinescu [:aflorinescu]]

Removing NI, wrong impression.

Comment 3

[Adrian Florinescu [:aflorinescu]]

Firefox 98 shipping soon, updating flags.

Comment 4

[Shane Hughes [:aminomancer]]

I like the idea of using the badge to display the number of downloads. If it's tied to the indicator attention array then it can always be superseded by a warning/error/critical attention state, but still show a number of active downloads for a none/success attention state. Idk if the number badge suffices as a strong attention-grabbing kind of feedback, but either way it seems useful and not very disturbing.

Maybe in addition there could be a bigger notification. Before the Proton redesign, there were start/progress/finish animations for the downloads button icon itself, but then in addition to that, when a download started, there was an additional animation that played in an additional box. Basically a scaled-up version of the downloads icon popped up above the downloads button, then gradually scaled and translated down until it intersected with the downloads button.

I think this is the one, and here is the vector file. I guess all the animatable boxes were removed for some good reason, but we could do something similar just in order to increase the overall visual footprint of the feedback. I always thought that animation looked really neat.