Hello Tor!

USABLE project from Internews collected some feedback [attached a summary of it] from a group of 10 East African digital security trainers that they met earlier this year. They will be doing more of these and we hope to coordinate with them as well, giving feedback on their process, getting their help to test improvements we will be working on and so on.

I decided to take this opportunity to talk about the user path for tor browser :) I would like to start to use the areas of this path when describing user actions so we can think by those different moments of the user experience. For instance, this feedback Internews collected is more focus on the 'acquisition' part of this path.

So what are these moments for Tor Browser? Before Montreal I was working with TB team, helping them prep stuff for their roadmap session. I asked them to organize tickets by 'awareness','acquisition' and 'retention'. These are very common phases that you can identify on any product. But for Tor Browser, this is how I think of them:

awareness

Is the moment someone hear, read, learn about Tor. That can be at a talk, training, social media or through a friend. So our presence on social media, our support to trainers, our outreach efforts, all goes into this.

The common next step for someone here is to either search for Tor to find our site or try to go directly to our site. Or in some cases search for Tor on app stores.

So our work on what information is displayed at search results, our work on our app store pages and most important, our work for solutions when these common paths are censored, like Get Tor, is very important.

Here is an example of improvement focus on the above, we changed the copy of the search results to give a tip to the user in case they can't open our site [1].

Looking at data early this year (specially from our play store analytics page [2] we are not doing bad here, most people who comes to the store downloads the app. And looking at the steady number of downloads of the desktop browser [3] is not that bad either. Of course we need to improve a lot, our sites are not localized and are terrible. But in general we are doing better here than in other areas of the user path.

acquisition

If this was a social media app, acquisition is the 'sign up flow' the user goes through. For Tor, the way I think of it is that acquisition are all the steps the user goes from being able to download the browser and install it, then being able to launch and connect to the Tor network. Once the user has the browser open and can browse the internet, they are done with their acquisition path.

You will see at the Internews feedback pdf, the tasks they asked the user to perform are around this area.

Even though this feedback is not a big surprise for us, it does help us build a baseline to support our reasons to change things :) and of course, with this baseline we can later on, validate if our changes actually helped user. If their perspectives related to the experience has changed.

For instance, problems related to tasks #3 and #6 of the attached pdf are things we are working on or has already on our roadmap[4]. With this baseline, we can test our changes and compare if we have improved from there.

BTW - we assume we are loosing a lot of people here by looking at download numbers of clients and actual connections at the network. that said, this are assumptions, we can't prove anything :P

retention

This is one of the most important and hard parts of the user experience. For one we have no idea who we are retaining today, because we don't track that. We don't know if the 2M connections on the network today are users and if they are, we have no idea if they are the same ones that were there yesterday, or the day before and so on.

This part of the path starts with the about:tor page and is everything else that is related to enable the user to understand what is going on and have control to customize their experience so they can have the results they are looking for.

The more frustration the user has on any of the above, related to things not working or not knowing how to use things or not understanding what is going. Is a good enough reason for them to close the browser and maybe not open it again.

That is a lot of work to be done here, and we do have items on TB team, Network team and UX team roadmaps related to it. And face to face user testing will help us validate if what we are doing is indeed helpful for the user.

'resurrection'

Tor doesn't do this. Like, the moment a user gets frustrated with TB and closes it, we can't contact that user, send them an email saying 'hey we got a new feature, give us another chance' which is what resurrection means hehe getting someone who left your product to come back.

But we should be pro-active in telling the world about our improvements. Specially visible changes improvements. That is our moment to reach people who have tried Tor and gave up, to give it another chance.

I have been talking about this with the comms team and with their help we will start doing more of this type of work.

Conclusion?

This is just a little summary of how we are organizing our thoughts and tasks related to helping the user. Is a work in progress too :) we are always talking and reflecting about these things. I wanted to share these thoughts with a broader audience, I have done it before but have been a while, so I thought of doing it again.

Thanks for those who read so far! Cheers, Isabela

[1] https://share.riseup.net/#3iFTZxsII6C8Q0i9lx5k0g [2] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1a0Lwuj44mjtDqm28cSRKr2Udu2QVArLtGYcC... [3] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1a0Lwuj44mjtDqm28cSRKr2Udu2QVArLtGYcC... [4] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ELMvnIksL-m_r0vJt_rwpIkcjyzZpCyYiQJO...