Re: Possible interface changes to Clear Recent History dialog

[Alex Faaborg]

An update to the clear recent history UI, it looks like the list view
being used to display the selected time range won't be fully ready for
Firefox 3.5 (we want to make some major changes in order to make the
interface easier to use), so we are going to remove it from the
interface and add it back later. However we believe the original
goals and non-goals of the interface are still valid, so we are still
planing on shipping the new Clear Recent History dialog box, just
without the list box to tweak the exact time range.

Updated mockup: http://people.mozilla.com/~faaborg/files/shiretoko/clearRecentHistoryi6.png

Let's continue to use this thread for discussion and feedback,

-Alex

On Mar 4, 2009, at 6:24 PM, Alex Faaborg wrote:

> I'm looking for some feedback for possible interfaces changes to the
> Clear Recent History dialog box. This isn't necessarily something
> that will make the cut for 3.1 (although that would be ideal), but
> might just be something that we eventually land on trunk.
>
> Interface details and mockup: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox3.1/Sprints/Clear_Recent_History_by_Time_Range
>
> General idea: Instead of offering only hard 1/2/4 hour segments,
> provide a way to modify the specific range of your history to be
> obliterated, showing dates and visited sites.
>
> -Goal: add a time selection widget to both provide visual feedback
> and confirmation of what is going to be removed, and to give the
> user a finer grained level of control for selecting a specific range.
> -Use case: guess that you want to clear about two hours, see that
> this looks right (or drag the range a little, since it was really
> more like two hours and 15 min), and then click clear.
>
> -Goal: provide more warning before the user clears all of their
> history
> -Use case: user selects "everything" by accident, and they
> subsequently realize that they don't want to nuke all the history in
> their profile thanks to the warning interface we have designed.
>
> Non-Goals:
>
> -The largest non-goal is to directly cater to the needs of users who
> expect the dialog to behave in the same way as the previous version.
> For instance, if the user regularly opens this dialog to clear all
> of your active logins, this now a more complex operation since they
> need to now expand the details are, and also scroll down to get to
> active log-ins.
>
> -Another non-goal is for this dialog to enable a full reset of
> Firefox (including personal data level things like passwords,
> bookmarks, new dictionary entries, add-ons and and setting). A total
> Firefox reset is best handled with some type of higher level profile
> manager UI, and probably not from inside of the application itself.
>
> Cheers,
> -Alex
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[Justin Dolske]

On 4/14/09 2:55 PM, Alex Faaborg wrote:
> An update to the clear recent history UI, it looks like the list view
> being used to display the selected time range won't be fully ready for
> Firefox 3.5 (we want to make some major changes in order to make the
> interface easier to use), so we are going to remove it from the
> interface and add it back later.

Will the pre-set time ranges include values under "1 hour"? I'd like the
ability to clear out a little bit of recent data, without nuking a whole
hour's worth of data. Say, something in the 5-15 minute range.

Justin

[Alex Faaborg]

Currently 1 hour is both the default and minimum, and we don't have a
whole lot of rationale behind that decision other than "seems like a
good choice." We could perhaps introduce finer granularity, but I
would want to keep 1 hour the default since that seems like it will be
enough to eliminate the users entire browsing session, which is the
overall goal. (using session in the "sit down and browse the web"
sense, not in the sense of session restore).

Something else we could consider in the future is actually analyze
when browsing sessions seem to start and stop, and if there is a
recent clearly defined chunk of activity, default to eliminating that
(even if it is 1:03).

-Alex

[Michael Connor]

We don't have strings for that, so it's almost certainly a no.

-- Mike