643996 - use the title of the page as the subject in email shares

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Mozilla Labs :: F1, defect, P5)

Description

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

pretty self explanatory, we should be filling in the subject with the title of the page.

Comment 2

[Paul [pwd]]

The bug that appeared to encapsulate twitter was duped to this one, however this appears to refer to email only?

Comment 3

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

(In reply to comment #2)
> The bug that appeared to encapsulate twitter was duped to this one, however
> this appears to refer to email only?

I didn't catch twitter as part of bug 650669; I assumed it was email only because of the references to the send link functions which are email via the mailto: protocol.

Just to note that we don't have any plans to use the title in Twitter right now but it definitely is planned for the subject in email.

Comment 4

[Paul [pwd]]

Pretty much every in-page widget provides the page title by default, why is the share feature going against the grain with this? To get the page title isn't a huge deal in terms of lines of code. This seems like a glaring usability issue, especially if you can see fit to provide it for one medium but not another. It's actually baffling.

Comment 5

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Pretty much every in-page widget provides the page title by default, why is the
> share feature going against the grain with this? 

In our research we've found there are lots of differences as each provider is able to suggest what the content of a tweet is.  But a good point that many of them do this.  It would be beneficial to get some real data here on what is done and also what people are expecting.

> To get the page title isn't a huge deal in terms of lines of code. 

We already get the page title, in terms of code it is mostly done.  For email it should be a quick change, for twitter a bit more.  But this isn't a measure of if we should get it done.

> This seems like a glaring usability issue,
> especially if you can see fit to provide it for one medium but not another.

We've done many usability studies on F1 and haven't encountered a problem here so far other than in Email.  We have another larger usability study underway in the next couple weeks, I'll see if we have time to address this question for Twitter.

> It's actually baffling.

We're treating each medium as it's own experience.  In Twitter the use of #hashtags can make sense but that doesn't make as much sense in Email or Facebook; so there will always be slight differences in how we treat each account type.

Comment 6

[Mark Hammond (PTO; back Oct-3) [:markh] [:mhammond]]

In the current addon the subject comes from a text field.  So  I think this bug is really now saying "default the subject field to the page title", right?

One downside of this is that once a field has a value, the field's purpose is hidden.  Eg, when the field is empty you see gray text saying "Subject" which vanishes as soon as the field has a value.  If we provide a default, that hint will never be seen.  We already have a similar problem for the message field, although most users will probably guess what that is for.

Comment 7

[Paul [pwd]]

I'm saying "default the message field to the page title" as per the tweet button that's embedded on pages will most often default to "page title v/ @sitetwitter account".

Comment 8

[Mark Hammond (PTO; back Oct-3) [:markh] [:mhammond]]

@Paul - I think the duplicate bug you initially referred to is Bug 647606 - "Provide page title in subject field for sharing tweets" - but twitter has no "subject" field.  Let's keep this bug about email and if you feel strongly that the *message* of a twitter share should default to the page title, let's open a feature request for that - but as Bryan mentioned in comment 3, we don't currently plan to do that.

@Bryan - can you please confirm that my comment 6 is what should happen for emails?

Comment 9

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

(In reply to Mark Hammond (:markh) from comment #8)
> @Bryan - can you please confirm that my comment 6 is what should happen for
> emails?

Yes, I think people will understand that the text box between the recipients and message area is for the subject even if they can't see the placeholder text anymore.  We have this same problem for when we auto-focus fields and might need a new strategy all together so lets not tackle that here.

Comment 10

[Mark Hammond (PTO; back Oct-3) [:markh] [:mhammond]]

Attachment: Pointer to Github pull request: https://github.com/mozilla/fx-share-addon/pull/18

Pointer to Github pull-request

Comment 11

[Mark Hammond (PTO; back Oct-3) [:markh] [:mhammond]]

Comment on attachment 564434 [details]
Pointer to Github pull request: https://github.com/mozilla/fx-share-addon/pull/18

This sets the subject field to the page title for gmail shares.

Comment 12

[Mark Hammond (PTO; back Oct-3) [:markh] [:mhammond]]

I merged this to develop and release/fx-q3 and I'll close this bug once Bryan says it looks good!

Comment 13

[Mark Hammond (PTO; back Oct-3) [:markh] [:mhammond]]

Thanks!