Hi there,
I really liked the discussion last Friday, thanks for organizing it! I wanted to share some thoughts I have in relationship to being User First or not.
It got me by surprise that folks did not thought we are already User First. I think by the time we are investing so much on learning about our users and applying improvements that focus on making their experience better we are being User First.
Getting a full dedicated team (UX) just to support this development process, all the 8.0 work and getting ourselves to mobile to reach more users are things we are doing because we are prioritizing our user.
At the discussion I saw folks had questions regarding the direction we should be thinking, becoming a full browser or keeping doing what we are doing. And to do what we are doing might not include things that are on Arthur's doc. Also, how we deal with other browsers trying to provide a private experience with Tor network, like we do.
This is how I see it. First, I don't think we (the Tor Project) are in the business of competing in the Browser market. We are in the business of providing anonymity and privacy technologies, and that is what we are doing.
We should own this, use our Tor Browser to show how the experience can be for all different types of use cases with anonymity and privacy as the main drivers for this experience.
I know there has been (and will always be) discussions on how we should build a feature, stuff like what settings should be pre-configured or not. And that is normal, we are building experience for a diverse user base. Some people will need all security features we can provide, and some will want a subset of it. At the end of the day, our mission should be to provide users choices for customizing their experience. Retention comes from one being able to control their experience.
We should allow this control to our users. And of course, should make sure we are providing education for them to make such decisions.
What is on Arthur's doc does not make us less or more user first. It's part of an organic process we are going through as we invest more and more on our users. So, this got me thinking, the question here is not should we be 'user first' or not. We are already. The question here is: what are the principles that will guide us while making the decisions on our product?
For instance, I think that one of our principles is that if we can provide a secure way of doing something, that should exist for our user by default. Be that something like the backend fix for the window resizing suggestion from Arthur doc, or an 'opted-in' configuration that allows our user to save their browser history.
So my suggestion here is for us to brainstorm our principles. Review Tor mission but also think of the TB as a team mission on what y'all are building.
cheers, isabela
ps1: regarding how we deal with other browsers adopting tor - we should do our best to influence them to adopt all our standards for security and privacy but as well as the experience we are shaping. If we are successful with that then we will have different problems to think about :) which should not influence this vision exercise because I don't think that will happen in the next 2 years or so. which is the timeframe this exercise is focusing on.
ps2: Arthur's doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AN4RsNhZW7uqfjDQBAvw3kLFymFBBaDU6lh4YvEz...