Thanks Nils, some good comments here, I added my views below.
On 7/25/2014 5:16 AM, Nils Ohlmeier wrote:
Hi,
not sure if this is best place to start a discussion, but I wanted to
throw out my view on a minimum viable calling solution for loop.
The link clicker in my view is not an acceptable solution for the end
user.
It would be as if I give my parents a phone number where reachable for
the next X hours, but if they want to call me tomorrow they first need
to ask me via email (or some other communication tool) what my number
today is. In my experience this is really hard to explain to
non-technical people.
The account-less mode indeed does not address recurring communication
scenarios in the most convenient way although we're hoping people will
see value in the fact that you don't need to sign-up or share permanent
identity to talk to someone else. We'll be monitoring the drop-off rates
between "URLs shared", "URLs clicked" and "people actually getting in a
call" to understand if this URL sharing solution makes sense to the
users and where it should be improved through better UX.
The other reason is that on mobile devices it is not easy to copy a
URL from a calling app into some other communication tool to send it
out to some.
I'm not sure I fully understand your point here - on mobile you'd either
click a link or if you have a client app (FFOS) you can generate a
call-back link that you'll share leveraging app's features which make it
easy. Not sure I understand why you'd want to copy / paste the URL?
On the other hand on desktop I don't see why we have to have an
address book integration a.k.a. contacts. This is only valuable if my
address book contains the Firefox Account email of my contact, or the
contact has verified his phone number via the Loop MSISDN server. Both
are pretty unlikely in my opinion.
There will indeed be challenges there related to the social graph for
direct calling although the hope is that:
1 A contact list will make it easier to share URLs initially as the
e-mail address of the callee will be known already (you try to call a
contact but if he's not on the social graph you get offered to send him
a call-back link to his e-mail address contained in your address book)
2 As URLs get shared to non social graph members, these people have an
incentive to sign-up to Hello themselves so that the social graph gets
bigger
In any case it is understood that at the beginning there will be very
low volumes of direct calls between registered users.
Never the less I think a direct calling solution based on
authenticated URLs is viable. If we integrate Firefox Accounts that
would allow me to hand out either my email address or maybe permanent
URL like loop.com/nils as the URL where I'm permanently reachable.
Without an address book integrated into the Loop client this would
require some form of input field where I can enter the email address
or URL of the target user. But that should be easy to implement.
Totally agree regarding the value of vanity URLs although as per a
previous discussion with Adam on this subject the challenges we'll need
to overcome around such URLs will be their discoverability and access
control.
Given we have no identity solution implemented as yet it also makes
sense to start with random time limited URLs for account-less users to
understand user appetite for them but I agree we'll probably want such
URLs once FxA integration gets implemented.
We could also store once dialed email addresses or URLs locally for
convenience until we have a server based address book integration.
Best regards
Nils Ohlmeier
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