Silent Update whatsnew
Status
| Silent Update: Lessen the showing of the what's new page | |
| Stage | Shipped |
| Status | Complete |
| Release target | Firefox 8 |
| Health | OK |
| Status note | Working with Product Marketing on the new channels to communicate to our users. |
Team
| Product manager | Chris Lee |
| Directly Responsible Individual | Lawrence Mandel |
| Lead engineer | Laura Mesa |
| Security lead | ` |
| Privacy lead | ` |
| Localization lead | ` |
| Accessibility lead | ` |
| QA lead | Mihaela Velimiroviciu |
| UX lead | ` |
| Product marketing lead | ` |
| Operations lead | ` |
| Additional members | ` |
Open issues/risks
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Stage 1: Definition
1. Feature overview
With Silent Update, the What's New page itself is less relevant to the user given we want to be "silent". However, there is a need for Product Marketing/Engagement to communicate to our users on a regular basis and the purpose of this feature page is to define those requirements.
2. Users & use cases
Ways to Minimize the What's New Page Experience Ideas:
- Decrease frequency - perhaps taper off
- Utilize new Home Tab
- Move link to bookmark
- Move link into some other area in the Menu bar
- A opt-in model
- Bigger "About Firefox" page to let users know What's New (LMesa)
- Start page (60-70% of users do not change the default)
- Home tab will replace Start page (options that allow people to customize)
- "Getting Started" bookmark
Notes:
- Also note that the snippet space as we know it will be replaced by the Home Tab as well
- Involve the UX people to help incorporate engagement touchpoints into UI changes coming
- First Run will not be touched
3. Dependencies
We already have the ability to enable or disable the what's new page on a per release basis. The client side work to provide this functionality is available with Firefox 4 and above. The remaining server side work is being done in bug 459972.
4. Requirements
Engagement/PMM Feature Requirements:
- Be able to tell people What's New within Firefox (updatable)
- Engagement touchpoints - email, Twitter, Facebook
- Promo spots for campaigns (ex. Webify Me) and products (mobile, apps, add-ons, etc)
- User alerts (ex. "Your Flash is out-of-date")
- (all of the above have the standard features of a web page - easily updatable; flexible in terms of A-B testing, rotating content, etc...vs something hard-coded into the browser chrome)
- Ability to push people off older versions (ex. warning people to upgrade from 3.6)
- A/B test who sees the what's new page (i.e. 95% see it, 5% don't see it) and track their engagement
Non-goals
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Stage 2: Design
5. Functional specification
- The client side functionality was implemented for Firefox 4.
- The remaining server side work is being done in
bug 459972
6. User experience design
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Stage 3: Planning
7. Implementation plan
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8. Reviews
Security review
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Privacy review
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Localization review
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Accessibility
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Quality Assurance review
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Operations review
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Stage 4: Development
9. Implementation
For this feature, the implementation will provide the ability to declaratively (in the release manifest) turn the what's new page on or off for a given release.
- The client side functionality was implemented for Firefox 4.
- The remaining server side work is being done in
bug 459972
Stage 5: Release
10. Landing criteria
Stakeholders can make a decision to show or hide the what's new page for each release. The what's new page can be declaratively turned on or off by releng with no client side code changes.
Feature details
| Priority | P1 |
| Rank | 1.1 |
| Theme / Goal | Experience |
| Roadmap | Firefox Desktop |
| Secondary roadmap | ` |
| Feature list | Desktop |
| Project | Silent Update |
| Engineering team | Release Engineering |
Team status notes
| status | notes | |
| Products | ` | ` |
| Engineering | ` | ` |
| Security | sec-review-unnecessary | ` |
| Privacy | ` | ` |
| Localization | ` | ` |
| Accessibility | ` | ` |
| Quality assurance | Signed Off | Test Plan |
| User experience | ` | ` |
| Product marketing | ` | ` |
| Operations | ` | ` |
