931021 - [Meta] Refinements to contextual actions on the Home Page

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Ian Barlow (:ibarlow)]

Attachment: ffxandroid-contextualactions-awesomescreen-131018.png

Goals
* Unify and simplify the actions available to users when they long press on content on about:home. 
* Make the experience of pinning thumbnails more straightforward.
* Remove extraneous features / menu items where possible.

Specific changes (see attached design flows)
* Update pinning UX as per flows
** Includes updating interaction behaviours
** Includes changing context menu items
** Includes new Add and Edit menus
* Remove "Share" and "Add to Home Screen" functions from menus
* Update list item context menus as per flows
* Update "Edit bookmark" UI


See the attached design flows for specific details. This is a somewhat large body of work, so we can break out more fine grain tasks into bugs linked to this one if need be. I have also linked other related bugs to this one, as these new design flows should address some of the concerns voiced in them.

Comment 1

[Wesley Johnston (:wesj)]

I understand the desire to simplify, but I really think removing things like Share and Add to homescreen from these menus makes two, often requested features harder to find/do. The difficulty finding "Add to homescreen" is one of the biggest complaints I still hear about. This makes it HARDER to find? And we've hyped "Sharing" to the moon, so it also seems strange to make it harder to do also...

I'd rather an implementation that maybe combined some of these actions or grouped them. i.e. Can we put Open in new tab and Open in private tab together (we actually used to only show the one relevent to mode. i.e. if you were in private mode we showed "private", otherwise "new" to avoid weird color issues, but how often is there something in your history or bookmarks that you want to open privately?). Or can we combine Add to homescreen and Share into something easier to parse?

Comment 2

[:Margaret Leibovic]

This is difficult to argue without real user testing, but how often do you want to share a page that's on about:home as opposed to the page you're currently viewing? I feel like I'm much more likely to share a new page I found, rather than one in my bookmarks/history.

As for "Add to Home Screen", I do see your point about how it's not very discoverable right now, and top sites on about:home are probably sites users would want to add the home screen.

However, I really do think we need to be careful about what items we include in context menus. Adding more items does not equal a more useful context menu. I think what we really need to think about is what users are trying to do when they long tap on these items.

Comment 3

[Wesley Johnston (:wesj)]

To be honest, I consider this secondary, hard to find UI in and of itself. Its a last resort for users when they can't find something in the primary UI, and its mostly secondary actions. I agree, its really hard to do this without telemetry though, but even with it I'd be suspect we'd get a strong bias towards what technical users want and not what users want.

Personally, I worry less about the number of items in here, and more about the users ability to parse the list of items quickly.

We could fix some of this with an ActionMode maybe? i.e. long press puts you in a multiple selection with icons at the top (and an overflow menu for less commonly used actions?)

Comment 4

[Peter Retzer (:pretzer)]

Ian, is WONTFIXing bug 933428 a final decision? If so, I think the design flow you attached here is obsolete and needs an update. Also, thumbnails should have the same options as the top sites items from the list below the thumbnails then, right? (See the older bug 821048 and the new bug 950610)

Comment 5

[Ian Barlow (:ibarlow)]

(In reply to Peter Retzer (:pretzer) from comment #4)
> Ian, is WONTFIXing bug 933428 a final decision? If so, I think the design
> flow you attached here is obsolete and needs an update. 

Yes. I can try to get something up here soon.

> Also, thumbnails
> should have the same options as the top sites items from the list below the
> thumbnails then, right? (See the older bug 821048 and the new bug 950610)

Yes. (Except for the Add / Edit pin part)

Comment 6

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