763806 - allow social providers to specify less-intrusive "shrunken sidebars"

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Graveyard :: SocialAPI, enhancement)

Description

[Jennifer Morrow [:Boriss] (UX)]

Part of our goal in implementing Facebook's sidebar is to allow users to continue their Firefox browsing while being in touch with their social circle.  In this way, Facebook is available and scannable, but also ignorable.

Of course, if a user wants to focus, they can temporarily hide the Facebook sidebar.  But what if they're still having a conversation with a Facebook contact?  What if that conversation is part of their browsing task?  For instance, say a user wanted to pick a restaurant eat at with a friend.  They would want to continue talking to that friend while browsing restaurant websites, but the other information in their social feed would be irrelevant and possibly distracting.

The attached mockup shows a smaller, shrunken state of the Facebook sidebar.  All but contacts' avatars and active conversations are hidden.

There's other reasons than distraction to allow users an option halfway between the full Facebook sidebar and no sidebar at all.  Contact names and contact notifications represent deeply personal data.  Any one contact could be a very private part of a person's life.  Any notification could contain private information, profanity, or other data that users may not want to have visible at all times.

By giving users the ability to shrink their bar to just their contacts' faces, we're allowing them to continue browsing with more screen real estate and continue conversations while disengaging from the more frenzied slew of information in their social feed.  With names hidden, potentially private data is less likely to be glimpsed by a passer-by.  But, functionality isn't highly reduced: users are likely to recognize the contacts they converse with.  If an avatar is unfamiliar, the user can mouse over it for the contacts' full name.

Comment 1

[Jennifer Morrow [:Boriss] (UX)]

Attachment: Mockup: Shrunken Facebook Toolbar State

Comment 2

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

How will this interact with the ability to resize the panel?  Eg, if the panel is not in "shrunken" mode but the sidebar is dragged to a very small size, does it automatically start behaving as if explicitly shrunken?  And the inverse; if the sidebar is explicitly shrunken and the sidebar is dynamically resized larger, does it automatically act as if the user de-selected shrunken?

Comment 3

[Jennifer Morrow [:Boriss] (UX)]

(In reply to Mark Hammond (:markh) from comment #2)
> If the
> panel is not in "shrunken" mode but the sidebar is dragged to a very small
> size, does it automatically start behaving as if explicitly shrunken? 

Yes - the shrunken mode could be manually created by physically dragging the bar to a small enough width.

> if the sidebar is explicitly shrunken and the sidebar is
> dynamically resized larger, does it automatically act as if the user
> de-selected shrunken?

Yes - it could also be manually un-shrunken by being dragged out to a larger width.

You're correct that physically dragging the bar allows users to switch between shrunken and non-shrunken states without going to the menu item.

Comment 4

[Jennifer Morrow [:Boriss] (UX)]

Attachment: Mockup: Shrunken Facebook Toolbar State

(same mockup but with updated toolbar)

Comment 5

[Shane Caraveo (:mixedpuppy)]

I wonder if this can be defined by content rather than functionality in the browser.  via css content can handle different screen sizes easily enough, so we shouldn't need to do anything for that.  As well, content can define the size of the panels (ie. we can resize to content size).  For the menuitem, the worker could send a message to us to indicate that it supports, and width of, shrunken heads. :)

Comment 6

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

Sorry for the bug-spam.  This is a first cut at bugs that need (or potentially need) a change to the social api to be implemented appropriately.

Comment 7

[Shane Caraveo (:mixedpuppy)]

deprecation in fx51