16:00:25 <donuts> #startmeeting UX Team Weekly Meeting, 20 December 2022
16:00:25 <MeetBot> Meeting started Tue Dec 20 16:00:25 2022 UTC.  The chair is donuts. Information about MeetBot at http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot.
16:00:25 <MeetBot> Useful Commands: #action #agreed #help #info #idea #link #topic.
16:00:42 <donuts> welcome everyone!
16:00:42 <donuts> pad is here: https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-ux-team-2022-keep
16:00:55 <donuts> please feel free to update your weekly planning sections while I fix it up
16:05:32 <donuts> btw, I was inspired by richard(?) to start formatting my lists as todo lists
16:05:39 <donuts> feel free to do or not to do the same ^^
16:05:54 <richard> otherwise i forget wtf i did the previous week vOv
16:06:30 <nicob> oooo. love a to-do list format
16:06:44 <championquizzer> i like this too!
16:07:25 * nicob is done with their section
16:07:27 <donuts> okay how are we all doing?
16:07:28 <donuts> great
16:07:32 * championquizzer too
16:07:51 <donuts> Two quick announcements:
16:08:22 <donuts> 12.0.1 was released on Friday (I think?), with initial improvements to drag
16:08:23 <donuts> n
16:08:26 <donuts> drop protection
16:08:33 <donuts> lol sorry, hit return by accident
16:08:35 <richard> \o/
16:08:57 <championquizzer> very nice! donuts thanks for handling all the feedback from forum too
16:09:05 <donuts> no prob!
16:09:16 <donuts> I've scraped some feedback off of the forum and added it to the ticket, but I haven't looked at reddit etc. yet
16:09:25 <donuts> but we can talk about that when we get around to the user support agenda item
16:09:45 <donuts> another quick announcement: I just spotted that Tails 5.8 has been released
16:09:47 <donuts> https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tails-58/
16:10:09 <nicob> nicee
16:10:10 <donuts> including QR code scanning for bridges!
16:10:26 <donuts> it's a big release
16:10:30 <nicob> \o/
16:10:38 <championquizzer> <3
16:10:42 <donuts> congrats to sajolida and the Tails team ^^
16:11:19 <donuts> I need to read the release notes properly, but the changes to persistent storage look great too
16:12:02 <championquizzer> about TB12, happy to report we didn't get anymore reports about the antivirus issue \o/
16:12:20 <donuts> fantastic, I noticed the thread had died down
16:12:24 <nicob> awesome
16:13:12 <donuts> it looks like we don't have anything in bold, so we can skip straight to talking about user feedback/support if everyone's happy?
16:13:41 <nicob> wfm
16:14:06 <donuts> championquizzer: would you like to go first?
16:15:21 <championquizzer> donuts: i don't have anything particular to discuss, last weeks we have focussing on support for ir/ru. what did you have in mind?
16:16:01 <donuts> oh I was just going to do a quick summary of lingering 12.0.x feedback
16:16:14 <championquizzer> oh hehe
16:16:16 <championquizzer> sure
16:16:45 <donuts> I've already mentioned the feedback that just came in about the drag & drop protection improvements in 12.0.1
16:17:20 <donuts> but I mentioned in the ticket that I'm concerned we're just funneling users to copy to clipboard instead, which may be worse on some systems?
16:17:30 <donuts> I've raised these points for the devs, who understand all this better than I
16:17:44 <donuts> however in general the improvements in 12.0.1 are excellent
16:18:02 <donuts> we should still maybe consider some kind of visible UX here, but that can wait until the new year
16:18:12 <donuts> (plus, I've not really figured out what that looks like yet)
16:18:42 <donuts> secondly, there have been a few complaints about media served by cloudflare not loading
16:19:54 <donuts> thanks to richard our friends at cloudflare think they've narrowed down the issue, and are working towards a fix
16:20:08 <championquizzer> oh that's fantastic
16:20:24 <donuts> I'm trying to think if anything else notable happened...
16:21:09 <championquizzer> iirc, there were also some reports of unable to upload/download from mega.nz (not sure if this is the only cloud provider affected but definitely saw this one mentioned)
16:21:09 <donuts> oh well here's some nice feedback to finish the year:
16:21:24 <donuts> "Thanks very much for the new version. Especially I’d personally like to thank Richard for #40708. Even if it may be a trivial compiler switch, a swift, willing fix was impressive :slight_smile: Thanks again for all contributor!"
16:21:31 <donuts> richard is a celeb
16:21:42 <championquizzer> hehe nice
16:21:47 <nicob> *claps*
16:21:53 <donuts> championquizzer: yeah, I think there are multiple things going on there – potentially including the cloudflare issue
16:22:07 <championquizzer> aha i see
16:22:19 <donuts> the user seems to have reported back that whatever it is is fixed now though
16:22:27 <donuts> so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
16:22:29 <richard> AH NEAT
16:22:33 <richard> sorry no shouty
16:22:44 <donuts> NEATO
16:22:51 <nicob> N E A T
16:23:41 <donuts> okay that brings us to the end of the agenda early
16:24:15 <donuts> I guess I could give a brief recap of some of the UX-related things we discussed at the Tor Browser 12.0 retrospective yesterday, if anyone's interested?
16:24:40 <championquizzer> donuts: re. dnd feature i am following tor-browser#41518 and see if i can find more feedback
16:25:20 <championquizzer> donuts: please do!
16:25:48 <donuts> championquizzer: excellent, thank you!
16:27:10 <donuts> So one of the things that came up in the program evaluation for our global south strategy was "reconciling grant cycles with product development cycles"
16:27:39 <donuts> meaning that in the past, project timelines and our development cycle can be totally different/independent of one another
16:27:59 <donuts> and that makes it tricky to plan user research/design/testing/QA around
16:28:31 <donuts> this is slightly exacerbated by the structure of our user feedback program, which couples training and testing together
16:29:03 <donuts> this was done for very good reasons and makes a lot of sense when it happens in person, but also means that the testing needs to happen around the training schedule
16:29:20 <donuts> So
16:29:39 <donuts> we're considering adding this as an activity in our next proposal
16:30:08 <donuts> specifically, we'd like to try and get Tor Browser onto more predicable major release cycles – say every 6 months
16:30:33 <donuts> and then we can split up each release into development stages that we can plan usability stuff around
16:31:16 <donuts> e.g. initial user research/planning, design, handoff, production of nightlies & alphas, usability testing (i.e. validation), QA and release
16:31:53 <donuts> in order to do this effectively, we'll also need to agree on the featureset of each release way in advance
16:32:03 <donuts> i.e. at the very start of the 6 month development cycle
16:32:11 <donuts> which I know will make championquizzer's life a lot easier too :)
16:32:48 <donuts> so, in summary, dev cycles should be more predictable and the UX-work done to support each release more systematic in future
16:33:42 <championquizzer> the usability stuff, i think, (given two major stable release per year) might consume at least two-three months every year combining both 6 month cycles
16:33:45 <donuts> If approved, this project will commence in July, but we'll take some baby steps to fix the low-hanging fruit in advance for 12.5 regardless
16:34:24 <donuts> championquizzer: yeah, I'm not totally sure how the logistics of it will work atm
16:34:44 <donuts> another problem is that if we return to in-person research and testing, there's only so much travel we can do within certain windows
16:34:51 <championquizzer> right
16:35:10 <donuts> but! tor planning things more conservatively would also be a good thing
16:35:14 <ggus> donuts: we should sync about trainings and ux feedback. we were not planning to have trainings in person for this next proposal.
16:35:44 <donuts> ggus: oh got it, that's good to know
16:35:55 <ggus> eg, trainings would be done by partners
16:36:01 <donuts> right
16:36:23 <donuts> we also have a bunch of work to do to improve support and reporting for partners conducting user research on our behalf
16:36:40 <donuts> some of which has commenced in phase 6
16:36:44 <donuts> but will carry across into the new contract too
16:37:11 <donuts> however we're still potentially traveling for other projects, which will also need to fit around this work
16:37:25 <donuts> as in, the redesigned dev cycles
16:37:32 <ggus> on firetail report there is a feedback about mixing ur and training, that i believe we should discuss more in depth.
16:38:12 <donuts> yep
16:39:25 <donuts> I'm also going to try and sneak in a bunch of dev work that's traditionally gone un-funded into this proposal
16:39:34 <donuts> but that still benefits users in the global south
16:39:50 <donuts> like annual accessibility audits and fixes
16:39:56 <donuts> font support work, where required
16:40:21 <donuts> alpha tester recruitment and general QA improvements
16:40:42 <donuts> emmapeel has also added in RTL support
16:41:00 <donuts> which is great
16:41:15 <championquizzer> +1!
16:41:22 <donuts> okay, that's it – any question/comments?
16:41:52 <championquizzer> thanks for all the updates, donuts
16:42:11 <nicob> thanks donuts! all good here
16:43:02 <ggus> donuts: for community+ux work, the activities that we have ur+trainings are ending on June/July 2023 (S30+S9+S96). i wonder what we should do next. repeat the cycle with new countries? change things?
16:44:49 <donuts> ggus: it's hard to say atm, we need to have a think about what would be most useful/practical and then have a conversation about it together
16:45:28 <donuts> I feel like the previous S30 proposal had the right idea, but it never lined up with our release schedule and we were all overloaded when it commenced
16:46:58 <donuts> For S96, the research Nah's planning on running Q1/2 next year will be a kind of test-run for operating in highly-censored countries
16:47:11 <donuts> so whether or not we repeat as is will depend on how that goes
16:48:07 <donuts> does that make sense?
16:51:14 <donuts> I'm gonna close the meeting, but we can continue the discussion in #tor-ux :)
16:51:17 <donuts> oh, quick reminder:
16:51:28 <donuts> our team priorities session will be in early january
16:51:28 <ggus> donuts: i don't know if we have time for that, because we need to deliver this new proposal on january 15
16:51:51 <ggus> and it's a 3years proposal
16:52:42 <donuts> ggus: wouldn't this kind of detail go into the annual work plans though?
16:52:55 <donuts> my understanding is that the strategy itself should be high-level enough that we can figure this out later
16:53:07 <nicob> sorry i need to duck out to get ready for the comms dir interview in a few mins, thanks all! o/
16:53:12 <donuts> in any case, I wasn't planning on saying anything specific here
16:53:16 <ggus> for example, if we don't include in country user research, it means we won't include flight tickets/budget to run user research.
16:53:43 <ggus> donuts: i need to go to comms dir interview, but let's sync about ux-community plans for s9
16:53:51 <donuts> ggus: sure thing, sounds good :)
16:54:36 <championquizzer> last meeting of 2022! thanks ux team for all the great work this year :)
16:54:40 <donuts> have a good week, and happy holidays everyone!
16:54:52 <championquizzer> happy holidays o/
16:54:55 <donuts> #endmeeting