698253 - Investigate How to Integrate Current UI into the Home Tab/New UI in order to Reduce User Confusion with New about:home UI

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Tan Wei Lin Jason [:Ryuji]]

The Home Tab is a good idea, but it will break UX very badly because it changes many old design with Home pages. Basically Home Tab is not just cosmetic cousin of his brother the home page, it will not do what the home page does(It does not open your home page at the tab that you are focusing at).

In order to reduce confusion among users, the New UI with Home Tab need to be similar with the Old UI with home page. I opened up this bug so that we can discuss how to reduce confusion among user with the new UI. If we can make the home tab perform function similar to the old Home Page, it can reduce user confusion.

Comment 1

[Tan Wei Lin Jason [:Ryuji]]

Attachment: Another example of what can be done.

This example is another approach that could be done to add current UI to the New UI. This approach provide more options. It allow user to choose between current and new UI.

Comment 2

[Tan Wei Lin Jason [:Ryuji]]

By implementing similar approaches to the current UI, users will take less time to learn how to use the feature and more time using the web. This will make them like Firefox better, since they will have less confusion, dataloss and bad experience with Firefox.

One of the ways of the similar approach to current UI to introduce the options through right click menu. It should have "open custom start-up page(s)". More options like replace current tabs, open in app tabs, open in normal tabs and open in new group can be added. 

Alternatively the Home Tab could be set to open custom start-up page(s) when the user double click the Home tab button. This idea is better than the first idea because users can perform a single action to open custom home pages just like the current approach(by pressing on the home page button). Then from here more option like replace current tabs, open in app tabs, open in normal tabs and open in new group can be added(like the first idea).

Comment 3

[Siddhartha Dugar [:sdrocking]]

In my opinion Home Tab should integrate the ideas of about:home and the new New Tab page. We can have a search box, a session restore button, thumbnails for top sites and buttons for Bookmarks, History, etc. The last part can wait till we have in-content pages for Library.

Comment 4

[Tan Wei Lin Jason [:Ryuji]]

(In reply to Siddhartha Dugar (sdrocking) from comment #3)
> In my opinion Home Tab should integrate the ideas of about:home and the new
> New Tab page. We can have a search box, a session restore button, thumbnails
> for top sites and buttons for Bookmarks, History, etc. The last part can
> wait till we have in-content pages for Library.

Your suggestion should belong to bug 711157 where they will implement the first stage of the contents in Home Tab. 

This bug is about how to reduce confusion to Users who are so used that the old Home button behaviour after the Home tab is released into Firefox. The problem is that breaking the usual browsing norm often make users confused. This is because most of them rarely read about new features introduce in the latest version of Firefox. By making the old UI live in the new UI, users can learn to accept new UI plus the old UI. 

One example can be seen in the attachment file. Another is to allow users to open Home page(s) in New App Tabs by the right click menu or to allow users to open home pages in App tabs every time they open Firefox.