13:59:37 <donuts> #startmeeting ux monthly sync
13:59:37 <MeetBot> Meeting started Tue Dec  7 13:59:37 2021 UTC.  The chair is donuts. Information about MeetBot at http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot.
13:59:37 <MeetBot> Useful Commands: #action #agreed #help #info #idea #link #topic.
13:59:58 <donuts> hello everyone, let's give it a minute or two to see who's here today :D
14:00:06 <donuts> pad, as always, is at: https://pad.riseup.net/p/1D8sK8Zy74b_0qclC97I-ux-team-monthly-2020-keep
14:00:13 <donuts> please add your items to the agenda
14:00:14 <richard> donuts: the blog post was in the wrong place given historical posts (and so the script that generates it does not work)
14:00:23 <sweet-curator> hi everyone
14:00:30 <donuts> hi sweet-curator!
14:00:35 <championquizzer> hello o/
14:00:35 <richard> the *other* link is a fallback link that just needed to be updated with the blog migration changing tags (or we never used that tag vOv)
14:00:59 <donuts> richard: ahhh, but the fallback only worked on certain platforms?
14:01:13 <donuts> hey championquizzer!
14:01:22 <richard> no the fallback url was just out of date
14:01:30 <richard> or it never pointed to the right thing
14:01:43 <richard> I assume it's fallout from the blog migration from years ago
14:01:46 <donuts> right, I'm just confused as to why some people saw one link – and others got another
14:02:11 <donuts> like some users got the broken link, and I got the tag link
14:02:20 <donuts> i'm 99% sure we were looking at the same link
14:03:18 <donuts> oh this was all reported pre-migration too
14:03:29 <donuts> so the tag link was working at the time
14:03:33 <richard> so the falback url appears when there's no update to perform (I think)
14:04:13 <richard> ie if the browser knows hey we can get version X, it'll populate the version specific url, otherwise it links to all the tor-browser blog posts
14:04:20 <richard> if i recall correctly
14:04:27 <donuts> ya that makes sense
14:04:33 <donuts> okay I'll follow up in the ticket
14:04:56 <donuts> let's get started for real :)
14:05:07 <donuts> hello UX team
14:05:21 <donuts> first thing on the agenda is Tor Browser 11, fittingly enough
14:05:51 <donuts> we're continuing to provide user support for 11.0.1 on the forum, although the rate of support required has slowed down a bit
14:06:20 <donuts> there's a release candidate out for testing for 11.0.2 for desktop too
14:06:51 <donuts> hopefully that will see release soon, although will undoubtedly restart the user support cycle all over again because nobody reads the changelog
14:07:06 <donuts> and assumes a new release = everything is fixed
14:07:36 <donuts> there should hopefully be a workaround for the linux fonts issue in this release
14:07:49 <donuts> Win10 issues are still being investigated by the devs
14:08:05 <donuts> any questions?
14:08:15 <championquizzer> donuts: great work with the 11 and 11.0.1 forum threads. ty! allowed me to focus on frontdesk :)
14:08:29 <donuts> aha good I'm glad! anything you need help with championquizzer?
14:09:00 <championquizzer> i'm good for now! ty!
14:09:21 <donuts> great, on to the next item in the agenda!
14:09:40 <donuts> we've started interviewing candidates this week for the brand designer position \o/
14:09:50 <championquizzer> nice!
14:10:37 <nah> yay
14:10:43 <donuts> round 1 interviews should be concluded this week, and then we'll take the call on whether or not to keep the job post up
14:10:49 <donuts> depending on whether any of the interviewed candidates get advanced
14:11:11 <donuts> BUT, I'm hopeful that we'll begin 2022 in a better place resource-wise :)
14:11:22 <nah> \o/
14:11:35 <donuts> as a reminder, the long-term plan is for the brand designer to take a lot of the artworking/comms/fundraising/brand work off my hands
14:11:50 <donuts> so will have the added benefit of creating more donuts time for UX Design and applications PMing
14:12:05 <richard> donuts: sorry to jump in, but PierVo seems to have narrowed down the cause of the windows x64 crash to a mozilla patch that we can revert until mozilla fixes it
14:12:21 <richard> (so good progress on that front)
14:12:24 <donuts> richard: no prob, yeah I just read the bugzilla thread!
14:12:30 <donuts> lots of great progress this AM
14:12:34 <richard> ikr
14:13:46 <donuts> great week 2 investigative work by pierov ;D
14:14:13 <donuts> any Qs on the brand designer/grand plan or shall I move on to the next item in the agenda?
14:14:41 <donuts> sounds like a nope
14:14:52 <donuts> okay next up: "UX Team Project Management – how can we improve it?"
14:15:19 <donuts> I know I'm personally finding it tricky to keep track of work across the team, I'm not sure how you feel nah?
14:15:33 <donuts> as a reminder we have the roadmap & planning board already: https://www.figma.com/file/n4ETd0cUkcfj3KyclJQnt3/UX-Team-Planning?node-id=0%3A1
14:15:40 <donuts> and the UX kanban: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/boards?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&label_name[]=UX
14:15:56 <donuts> the roadmap provides a good very high level overview, but quickly goes out of date
14:16:07 <donuts> and the UX kanban is a mess of any UX issue across the entire org
14:16:15 <donuts> and doesn't really reflect our weekly workload
14:16:52 <donuts> So: I'm open to suggestions, whether that's just creating a new tag and kanban to track weekly work, or beginning weekly team meetings again, or both
14:17:16 <nah> yep
14:17:47 <nah> the planning board seems more easy to see things than the kanban
14:17:51 <donuts> there did used to be a "ux-team" tag, and I'm wondering if that was for this purpose
14:18:00 <nah> i totally in for weekly meeting starting in january?!
14:18:09 <donuts> i.e. to differentiate tpo UX issues form actual ux team work
14:18:13 <nah> or next week? :)
14:18:33 <donuts> next week I'll be afk at the implementers festival
14:18:40 <donuts> but let's do January!
14:18:49 <nah> great!
14:19:05 <nah> we can also start doing triage during the meetings too
14:19:06 <donuts> shall we use the same Tuesday timeslot?
14:19:09 <donuts> yesss
14:19:24 <donuts> I'm thinking every team meeting starts with our todolists and a mini triage
14:19:28 <donuts> like the good old days
14:19:41 <nah> tuesday 1300 utc works for me, but i'm open to change it if needed
14:20:25 <donuts> you mean 1400?
14:20:45 <nah> yes, sorry
14:20:49 <nah> :s
14:21:00 <championquizzer> tuesday 1300/1400 utc works for me as well but please prioritize what the members of ux team think :)
14:21:33 <donuts> okay we'll keep it at this timeslot for simplicity's sake :)
14:21:45 <donuts> I've added some notes to the pad, does that sound all good?
14:21:52 <donuts> Reminder: https://pad.riseup.net/p/1D8sK8Zy74b_0qclC97I-ux-team-monthly-2020-keep
14:21:52 <nah> yess!
14:22:03 <nah> can we change the pad in january to 2022?
14:22:06 <nah> hahaha
14:22:18 <championquizzer> ha!
14:22:25 <donuts> we're gonna have to blast "monthly" too lol
14:22:30 <donuts> new year, new pad
14:23:07 <donuts> okay final agenda item, is this one yours nah?
14:23:11 <nah> yess!
14:23:22 <nah> 4. Create research plan for volunteers
14:23:50 <nah> we have user researchers volunteering from time to time
14:23:58 <nah> a month ago i created this issue
14:23:59 <nah> https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/ux/research/-/issues/51
14:24:10 <nah> but i didn't have time to work on this yet :(
14:24:26 <sweet-curator> Still open to assisting, nah :)
14:24:28 <nah> donuts and i have been talking about creating more than one research plan
14:24:37 <donuts> that's okay, we've got a lot on atm
14:24:39 <donuts> yesss
14:25:25 <nah> so, current plan is to work on... a research plan for desktop and another one for mobile
14:25:50 <nah> sweet-curator: happy you're around! :)
14:25:56 <donuts> +1
14:26:07 <donuts> thanks for waiting on us pulling this together too :)
14:26:13 <nah> for desktop we've been thinking about using connect assist research plan
14:26:53 * nah searching the link
14:27:06 <nah> https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/ux/research/-/issues/53
14:27:12 <donuts> for context sweet-curator, we're currently working on expanding torconnect (the window that connects you to tor) with functionality that will attempt to automatically circumvent censorship
14:27:29 <sweet-curator> Got it. Thank you
14:27:33 <donuts> so if Tor is blocked, Tor Browser will try to solve the issue itself – instead of requiring manual configuration 100% of the time
14:28:34 <nah> yep! thanks donuts
14:28:55 <donuts> think clippy but for onions
14:29:00 <donuts> (j/k)
14:29:08 <nah> haha
14:29:15 <nah> so i think we also need to come with an onboarding process
14:30:00 <donuts> For the VPN?
14:30:21 <nah> not sure if all volunteers will be comfortable running a research usability testing/interview
14:30:31 <donuts> oh right sorry
14:30:33 <donuts> I understand now
14:30:34 <nah> or would prefer to assist during the creation of methodologies
14:31:10 <donuts> I think so long as we provide ample templates it should be okay
14:31:23 <donuts> kind of like what OKThanks did
14:31:41 <donuts> that's extra work though
14:31:48 <donuts> but... maybe there will be a brand designer to assist
14:32:38 <nah> also, we need to talk about recruitment criteria.
14:32:54 <nah> because you have the template but where will you apply it
14:33:16 <donuts> yep
14:33:23 <donuts> maybe it could be graduated
14:33:25 <nah> donuts, yes! another side of research for the brand designer :)
14:33:40 <donuts> like run your first session with friends/peers/fellow-students/colleagues
14:33:54 <donuts> and then advance to more important groups
14:34:58 <nah> yep! i like this idea. we can have an open floor to volunteers to share their findings
14:35:03 <nah> in our weekly meetings
14:35:41 <donuts> yes!
14:36:20 <nah> sweet-curator: how does it sounds to you?
14:37:04 <sweet-curator> Sounds good. May want a bit more context on what's already in place
14:37:06 <donuts> once we have something pulled together, sweet-curator can review it and offer a volunteer's perspective too :D
14:37:11 <sweet-curator> All documented?
14:37:38 <sweet-curator> Or all from scratch
14:38:18 <donuts> what do you mean, sorry
14:38:19 <donuts> ?
14:38:24 <nah> volunteers would work on a research plan or usability testing that's on going from our side
14:38:40 <nah> with their own community
14:38:53 <nah> at the beginning
14:39:03 <sweet-curator> Ok. I was wondering to know if there was already a volunteer process in place maybe find out what worked well/didn't
14:39:09 <nah> and share findings during ux team meetings
14:39:36 <donuts> ah right, we have a very barebones structure atm but the research activities themselves are all out of date
14:39:43 <donuts> and don't reflect our current priorities very well
14:39:44 <sweet-curator> Ok ok
14:40:06 <donuts> so this is a two-birds-with-one-stone kind of thing, updating our priorities and smoothing out the experience too :)
14:40:16 <sweet-curator> Got it
14:40:36 <sweet-curator> :D
14:40:57 <nah> ok, so i add this as the next steps
14:40:59 <nah> - create an onboarding process to volunteers
14:40:59 <nah> - send it to the mailing list
14:41:00 <nah> - open floor to share findings during the weekly meetings
14:41:38 <donuts> sounds good!
14:41:58 <donuts> this also perfectly leads us into the next topic
14:42:02 <donuts> which isn't on the agenda...
14:42:25 <nah> haha
14:42:47 <donuts> we're going to be on our holiday break on Tuesday 4th of Jan :D
14:43:14 <donuts> so, the next time we'll be together to review any progress will be Tuesday 11th of Jan
14:43:34 <donuts> and we'll pick up team meetings on a weekly basis thereafter
14:43:59 <nah> sounds good! :)
14:44:10 <championquizzer> as you might have noticed, my regular item, i.e. the report, is missing from the agenda cause I will be publishing it by today
14:44:19 <championquizzer> sorry about that
14:44:36 <championquizzer> BUT i can discuss if we have some time
14:44:42 <donuts> championquizzer: no problem at all, I sometimes add it to the agenda anyway but... *waves hands at december*
14:44:59 <donuts> whatever you like, feel free to give us a few lines summary now :)
14:45:06 <donuts> we have plenty time
14:45:07 <championquizzer> great, ty
14:45:44 <championquizzer> by faaar the most common issue we have to deal with last month was: TB 11 and 11.0.1 known issues
14:45:56 <championquizzer> 45 RT tickets!
14:46:01 <donuts> uft
14:46:03 <nah> :o
14:46:36 <championquizzer> then, 25 RT tickets - TB 11 incompatible with older versions of macOS
14:46:53 <donuts> nothing we can do about that unfortunately
14:47:00 <championquizzer> yeah
14:47:43 <donuts> in fact any up to date firefox based browser will no longer work for them
14:48:10 <championquizzer> 9 RT tickets - Protonmail crashing on TB 11.0.1 and workaround (technically is one of the TB 11 known issues but we had to make a separate template for this)
14:48:24 <donuts> it does bring up an important point for the VPN, in that we'll need to define our own limits of support for legacy OSes
14:48:42 <donuts> (i.e. previous Android versions initially)
14:48:56 <championquizzer> right
14:49:06 <donuts> championquizzer: did you see today's update on the tab crashes issue?
14:49:23 <donuts> https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/40721#note_2764740
14:49:37 * championquizzer is looking
14:50:08 <donuts> tl;dr it _may_ actually be a FF issue and has been reported to mozilla
14:50:17 <donuts> but I'd caution against taking anything for certain atm
14:50:41 <championquizzer> right but sounds like progress!
14:50:48 <donuts> yep!
14:51:49 <donuts> things will move a little quicker over the next couple of weeks now the team has an extra pair of hands or two
14:52:05 <donuts> but it's a squeeze to get the builds out before we break
14:52:12 <donuts> builds/releases
14:52:15 <donuts> (I imagine)
14:52:49 <championquizzer> that's all from me. please feel free to ask q's after the report is published! :)
14:52:56 <donuts> thanks championquizzer!
14:53:12 <donuts> I also have a note in my QA review for Jan to take a look at how we communicate known issues to users
14:53:24 <donuts> and maybe centralize these with any known workarounds/updates
14:53:45 <donuts> since in my experience a large part of the user support has just been doing this manually on a per-user basis
14:53:55 <championquizzer> good idea
14:54:34 <championquizzer> my idea for the forum is that we can create a knowledge base for known issues/ workaround when something like this happens
14:54:59 <donuts> yeah that sounds sensible
14:55:00 <championquizzer> constantly updating the manual/support portal is a bit too much for this, I believe
14:55:09 <nah> yep
14:56:29 <donuts> okay, tyvm both – it's been a busy month :)
14:56:34 <donuts> any final words before I hit the button?
14:57:09 <donuts> 3...
14:57:11 <donuts> 2...
14:57:13 <donuts> 1...
14:57:15 <donuts> #endmeeting