Interview Tiff

26 Nov 2019

Expert

Tiff is a UX manager at a large and very long standing internet software company. She’s extremely experienced with user research and design around URLs and navigating on the internet but not really sure on the use cases for P2P.

Key findings

• People are talking about ads and tracking feeling defeated, thinking “What can I do about it?” We have to look for the opportunities and show them impact
• Nobody knows how to connect to or be part of P2P or how easy or hard it might be
• Using P2P has to be an easier and more accessible version with something I’m already doing like sharing photos
• Users are concerned more with authenticity than the history of a file and don’t want to dig into the history but just would want a super easy way to know just in case

Interview notes

• Mozilla UX manager - mobile FF - app on iOS and Android and Amazon
• For work most of everything, email, docs and stuff like that since manager is done in the browser
• Her team uses Abstract so does reviews in that and spends a lot of time there
• No social media, but does email and ton of shopping, kids school stuff in a browser on a personal basis
• For the mobile browser she has been doing lots of research and mobile browser use is just informational searches, and is the same with her
• She has loads of apps but just opens browser to quick search things
• We call it the address bar or URL bar and generally just refer to type a search term or URL in it
• Some of research uncovered lots of people hesitant to type in the search bar - they want to type URLs
• Looking at ways to encourage to use that bar however they want
• In FF call it the awesome bar do cool things really leverage auto-complete with tabs, history and bookmarks. Its just faster - the awesome bar is just superior. It is more secure because can use DuckDuckGo and google looking at search results
• Never had to explain a URL ever before. Would say “Type the website here”
• How do explain what’s going on? At some level it doesn’t really matter
• Chrome is looking to remove the padlock so that you’re secure always
• HTTPS to the average person doesn’t really matter, they might care its better with it than without
• There is a feeling of safety, people should be knowing what they should be doing and why but they know they are unsafe
• People are talking about ads and tracking and people are feeling defeated, thinking “What can I do about it?”
• Part of her job is to communicate that they are not defeated. How do they feel now with things and then looking for opportunities and showing them what impact. FF has a protection report which is a step towards that, in this case seeing the different trackers.
• Taking a look next year how to make things cleaner with the address bar and helping people focus on things that are important
• Really like the shield in FF and someone on team designed animation
• Agrees that people don’t want the URL bar to go away, its synonymous with the browser. It would take very long to change if they tried to do it and would have to do it very slow over tons of iterations
• Has a vague grasp of P2P but wonders if she types the right thing in the URL bar and no idea how to and what to type except what you type in there
• If you wanted to connect to my computer, how would one know the address to connect to me? Is it the MAC or IP address or something? She would try a couple thing and eventually get it but would take a while
• How do you know what to do once we’re connected?
• Is it a file directory?
• I type in the thing to connect to your computer and then would think would see a web page with plain list of folders and files but would hope not the entire contents of your computer
• There should be something like a public folder in Dropbox where you mindfully put things in there
• It can remote into your computer so is there something I need to lock down?
• The main barriers to adoption is what do I do? People would need some sort of GUI or UI to step them through it
• The second barrier to adoption would be the value proposition, meaning why you would do this?
• How do Google and Dropbox do this? If I have a photo on my phone I just text it, I don’t have to p2p it to my mom
• If it were a single small thing would share with people such as photos (wouldn’t share docs that much) would usually email them instead.
• Trackable like Perforce? Basically long time ago with design specs there would be one copy on the internet you could check it out and block out other people
• For design stuff would be curious what the advantage of P2P would be over something like Abstract where things are checked in and out. You only want one copy or one thing checking in and out of
• It has to be easier and more accessible than something I’m already doing like sharing photos
• If you could automate it somehow more? For instance, kids birthday its on me to figure out which of 50 photos I want to share and email them over to grandpa. The school sends photos via email and then I forward it to the grandparents. If you could take out the middleman then that would be cool, would have a repo of photos that people could put stuff in there and authorise
• There is no cloud. The mental model of everybody is that things are beamed up in the cloud and beamed down when you need it. A repo is like this a spot in the cloud for the same purpose. It does’t matter for people that it is distributed if you trust other peoples computers.
• Files came with risks with pirating
• A Verify for files? People don’t want to dig into the history but just would want a super easy way to know
• Can contact again in the future