653190 - Design a mobile disco pane

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(addons.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Discovery Pane, defect)

Description

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

Attachment: example

Let's design a mobile disco pane.  The meetings/emails concluded with something like this:

- Featured add-ons are good to have on the page

- They are interested in specifically exposing language packs to users with auto-detection (eg. I want German but don't have that language pack installed).  
This would be really cool for desktop too.

- There are concerns about performance.  Right now our API is a single call that they format into the current page.  A disco pane would be several assets/requests.

- Current thinking has it replacing the "get add-ons" section of the current pref pane (see attachment for rough idea).  We're open to suggestions/alternatives/guidence on that

Comment 1

[Jason Grlicky [:grlicky]]

Notes from the kickoff meeting can be found here: http://etherpad.mozilla.com:9000/mobiledisco (thanks guys!)

Comment 2

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

What's the news/ETA on this bug?

Comment 3

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

Still looking for the timeline of this bug

Comment 4

[Gregory Koberger (:gkoberger)]

Just for posterity, summarizing the IRC chat on this:

Jason said nothing has bee done since the initial meeting, and is waiting on Thomas and Madhava.  Fligtar says "it's not a priority at all", and "in fact I don't want to do it this quarter."

Comment 5

[Thomas Arend [:tarend]]

Considering Comment 4, I guess we will have to wait until priorities align. This would be very nice to have, but it not one of our top priority feature requests at the moment. I will asked Madhava chime in as well with his guidance.

Comment 6

[Justin Scott [:fligtar]]

To clarify the irc snippets, AMO is swamped with several huge initiatives (Apps and Marketplace) in addition to our existing add-ons work, so we don't really have time to start on this right now.

Additionally, we've been experiencing some load time issues with the desktop discovery pane (bug 671444) and I'd want to make sure those are ironed out before adding similar features to mobile.

Comment 7

[Madhava Enros [:madhava]]

From the mobile UX side of things, this is one particular way of solving the general "make it easier to discover add-ons you'd want" problem in the mobile browser. Firefox on Android currently contains a very basic "app-market" style "get Add-ons" section of its add-ons manager that lets users see a flat list of recommended add-ons and also search the entire library. It's current issues are that it is (a) not very visually compelling, so I suspect a lot of users don't get drawn in and (b) that unless users are just taking our top 5 suggestions, they really have to know what they're looking for if they're going to find anything that suits them. These were both issues with the pre-discopane desktop add-ons manager, which is why we thought a mobile version would be a reasonable next step.

The next steps from the kick-off meeting were for Jason to work on some initial designs, for review with mobile UX, based on the direction outlined here (http://etherpad.mozilla.com:9000/mobiledisco). If he's available, I still think that makes sense for the same reasons it did initially: his amo/add-ons familiarity and mobile design expertise. If not, we can try to resource the mobile design side of things on the UX team.

Comment 8

[Christopher Van Wiemeersch [:cvan]]

What's the status of this? Do we still want a mobile disco pane?

Comment 9

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

Thanks for filing this.  Due to resource constraints we are closing bugs which we won't realistically be able to fix.  If you have a patch that applies to this bug please reopen.

For more info see http://micropipes.com/blog/2014/09/24/the-great-add-on-bug-triage/