Hi All,
As we prepare to ship the first FxA train of Q4 2015, let's also take a
moment to look back at Q3 and what we achieved. It can be easy to lose
sight of this when most of our meetings are about what's coming next,
but we covered a *lot* of ground in Q3.
Over the course of seven deployment trains, and in amongst many smaller
items that didn't make this list, here are some of the highlights from
the last three months of Firefox Accounts:
* We shipped a brand new, better looking, easier-to-use settings page,
and a lot of smaller profile-related improvements along with it. For
example, users can now set a display name, or choose to use gravatar for
their profile picture.
* When you're signed in to your browser, your customized profile
information shows up in Firefox's UI, e.g. with a profile image and
display name in the hamburger menu. It's a small but concrete
manifestation of our drive to make Firefox more personal.
* We improved the features and quality of our email experience. Users
now receive notifications when security-sensitive actions occur on their
account, and our emails look better and render more reliably across
different clients.
* We worked closely with the Growth team to put FxA signup inline in the
first-run flow, which produced a substantial improvement to our daily
signup rate.
* We invested heavily in gathering and analyzing metrics:
* Inbound metrics flags such as growth campaign entry-points are
preserved and reported correctly.
* We can send data to Google Analytics without integrating any
third-party JavaScript on our content pages.
* We now properly correlate metrics with user activity across email
verification loops.
* We now gather and graph navigation timing data.
* We emit key user-activity events on the server side, and route
them through to the same dashboards as the client-side metrics.
* We more reliably capture client-side metrics on page unload.
* We now provide content in several more officially-supported locales,
thanks to the awesome contributors behind Mozilla's l10n efforts.
* We stood up a very successful proof-of-concept tech demo for
integrating Sync and FxA with partner authentication systems, and landed
supporting code to make this easier for future partnerships.
* We supported the initial launch of Firefox for iOS, including a
web-based sign-in flow to help users carry their existing Firefox
experience into this brave new world.
* We laid much of the groundwork for a web-based sign-in flow on Fennec,
including the ability to customize your sync datatype selection through
web content.
* We helped users migrate from legacy Sync over to the new FxA-powered
Sync as painlessly as possible, enabling Cloud Ops to begin the process
of decommissioning the old sync hardware.
* We resolved some long-standing pain points in working with the
db-server backend code, merging what was three separate codebases into a
single repo that's significantly easier to work with.
* We started experimenting with a password strength checker, hopefully
the first of many things we can try out to help our users stay secure.
* We built out more A/B testing infrastructure, and ran a total of four
experiments on UX changes in production. You can read about the
outcomes at [1], and we'll do a lot more of this in future.
* We embarked on a refactor of one of the core abstractions in our
front-end code, reifying the "behaviours" and "capabilities" offered by
different authentication brokers into concrete objects. Preliminary
experience indicates this will be a very valuable abstraction going forward.
* We expanded our integration with Mozilla's email engagement system,
allowing the Engagement team to prepare targeted multi-step product
engagement "journeys" to users who opt-in to this stream.
* We are preparing to ship support for OAuth service tokens, a mechanism
to simplify use of FxA profile information by trusted Mozilla services.
* We began tracking and visualizing user retention metrics, with
preliminary results showing some interesting platform-specific
differences for us to dig into going forward.
On top of all that, we invested a lot of energy into refining our
planning and development process. We found some things that worked
well, as well as some things that didn't, and we kept the former while
quickly moving on from the later. We even wrote some of it down [2]!
I'm looking forward to continuing our work in Q4 and beyond; but that's
the subject of another email...
Cheers,
Ryan
[1]
https://mana.mozilla.org/wiki/display/CLOUDSERVICES/Detailed+Experiment+Reports
[2] http://fxa.readthedocs.org/
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