UX meeting 20190717

Leaving the below here from a few weeks ago, in honor of Stranger Things S03E08 (which everyone needs to see, if not yet seen, cried, or danced on one's sofa to)...

Attending: @ninavizz, @creviera, @redshiftzero, @eloquence, @emkll, @harris, @hueartanix, ???

Agenda:

• Source Research update/checkin (10min)
  • Get your kicks, on Issue #66!
• Workstation Happiness!
  • Skeleton/Loading user expectations mgmnt
    • Tor is slow. This we know. How to make client/server things glide across the danceroom floor with the best flow?
  • Export/Print Workstation Epic #290
    • To review today
    • For those unfamiliar with these things, there's a lot of Qubes-y non-intuitive background required to kinda understand... recommend peruzing thru the above to get requisite background. UX tickets, linked-to within.

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Notes

SD Printing

• Nina: What do we know about printers when they're plugged in?

• Mickael: CUPS can tell us if a USB printer is plugged in. lp-info-list or something like that will look for a printer if it's powered on. It is also possible to see USB drives that haven't been mounted yet. Working on determining if a drive is 1) connected 2) mounted 3) encrypted.

• Mickael: One thing that can be done is checking for a supported printers, e.g. one from a list we curate that doesn't have network hardware. This means regex matching which has issues and might not work 100% well forever. Mickael will post an example string for printer in Gitter: usb://Brother/HL-L2320D%20series?serial=A00000A000000.

• David: Is it too tin-foil-hat-y to be concerned about creating a list of printers that SD will connect to because of supply chain attacks?

• Mickael: In Tails SD, the printer connected directly to SVS which has the private key in it. In Qubes SD, there's some fancy VM parkour that happens so that the printer doesn't have the same level of access to the SVS qube.

• Nina: How are printer errors surfaced? Most modern printers have a display that tells users errors, might be redundant to have it also display in SD. Mickael is trying to get errors from CUPS but it keeps saying the printer is chill when the hardware says otherwise. There's a printer status, ready to receive jobs. If it's not though, it'll just error our and say printer error.

• Erik: Many consumer errors may accept jobs just fine in the software tooling, but only run into issues once it reaches the printer. Should be able to do a pre-flight check at least from the SD client side though, maybe.

• Nina: Some scenarios might be tricky; IT may be bringing in paper while user is queing up new jobs. Once a job is sent to CUPS, how much can stay in the client?

• Erik: User would not have to interact with the CUPS internals; It'll live under the hood in the client and VM. If a user gets a paper jam, how will they be notified? Sort of on the printer to let the user know at that point, probably.

• Nina: Will users have to be prompted to install drivers?

• Erik: Nope. Debian deals with all that behind the scenes.

• Nina: At what point in a flow has the user gone so far into a process that we want to make sure they don't cancel it by accident.

• Nina: Success state is when the user sees a big stack of paper (same tbh). On the software side, the client can't see whether the printer done goofed or not, it can only get a status but it only goes as far as "hey I got the file thx" but no way to tell if the hardware printed it or not, which is fairly typically of a lot of printer interactions.

Martin!

• Nina: Martin is contracting with Training team. Might be working with us more soon! Also interested in UX research. Going to be user testing SD stuff with strangers. Video capture and narration will be part of it. Narrow list of asks, e.g. Source UI demo for testing won't include Tor Browser or hella opsec stuff. Source journey, discovery not part of testing rn.

• Nina: Landing page may be the first thing to test. Daily Bugle is getting a SecureDrop to get more pictures of Spider Man.

• Nina: What else should be look at and test in the Source UI?

• Nina: Structured user feedback is the goal of this kind of user testing.

Action item for everyone

• Everyone please review the flowchart, link is in the agenda.