Work on selected improvements to user experience on Tor Browser (desktop and mobile).

Hi @Shreya, thanks for volunteering! There are quite a few issues open regarding the /download page that are going to necessitate a redesign next year, however if you'd like to ping me on IRC tomorrow we can find a task for you to contribute to.

mentioned in issue #55 (closed)

added UX Team label

removed the relation with #32 (closed)

removed the relation with #33 (moved)

removed the relation with #35 (moved)

Before the holiday break @nah summarized all the sessions that have been conducted under the Sponsor 9 project from late 2020 to now here: #55 (closed) (thanks Nah!)

As she notes in the thread, the majority of our efforts were focused on understanding the contexts, challenges and needs users faced during the pandemic – which gathered lots of useful data for future training sessions and materials, but less in the way of specific UX improvements for Tor Browser itself.

However here's a quick summary of the applicable feedback that either has or will be implemented in Tor Browser:

The need to circumvent censorship during Internet shutdowns (India, Tanzania, Uganda & Survey participants)

Our proposal for mostly automatic censorship circumvention should markedly improve the experience of connecting to Tor for censored users. This work can be broken down into two major components from the end user's perspective:

Connection Assist: the new flow that will automatically detect and apply the correct circumvention settings as detailed in tpo/applications/tor-browser#40781 (closed), with development work happening in tpo/anti-censorship/bridgedb#40025 (closed) and tpo/applications/tor-browser#40773 (closed).
The redesign of about:preferences#tor: the design proposal for which can be found in tpo/applications/tor-browser#40782 (closed), with development work happening in tpo/applications/tor-browser#40774 (closed). This particular component is necessary to improve the user experience for censored users who are experiencing connection issues that Connection Assist cannot fix automatically – and to provide a more shareable user interface to facilitate the smoother sharing of working bridges among peers.

Difficulty finding a working bridge in Tor Browser (India)

See above.

No audio alternative to the CAPTCHA required to request a Bridge (India)

This is a known issue filed in tpo/anti-censorship/bridgedb#10831 (closed).

The longer term goal here is to phase out CAPTCHAs altogether, given that in addition to their poor accessibility, our current implementation is also not localizeable, and Tor users already experience an inordinate number of CAPTCHAs during regular web-browsing. Before we can do so we need to asses how effective they are at preventing the enumeration of bridge lines – a subject the Anti-Censorship team are designing an experiment for into as part of tpo/anti-censorship/bridgedb#40025 (closed).

However, should they in fact prove effective at preventing the enumeration of bridge lines, we should conduct a UX review to provide more user-friendly and accessible CAPTCHAs.

Difficulty finding and downloading Tor Browser during shutdowns (Uganda)

Although finding and sharing the Tor Browser installer in the event of total internet shutdowns remains difficult without use of a pre-installed or USB-shared VPN, upcoming work on the download page in tpo/web/tpo#248 and a review of our search engine rankings in tpo/web/tpo#249 will provide some improvement to the findability of Tor Browser. For those with partial Internet access but for whom torproject.org is blocked, the Community team are continuing to establish new website mirrors more resistant to blocking.

Data/bandwidth is very expensive (Kenya & Uganda)

Some important factors within our control here are the sizes of the Tor Browser installer, subsequent updates and internal pages like about:tor. One significant change in recent months with the potential to negatively affect all three is the addition of the Year End Campaign takeover in tpo/applications/tor-browser#40617 (closed).

In order to minimize the filesize introduced by these changes, the Applications team developed a layered SVG asset that loaded the localized text strings on top of a single base asset – rather than requiring individually localized assets for each language version of Tor Browser. This resulted in the total size of the base asset plus translated graphic assets clocking in at a total of 163kb.

Given the Tor Browser installer download varies at between 75-100+ mb, this is a small fraction of the total. In future, we should perform a review of the package to identify any legacy code or assets that can be removed in order to keep the installer as lean as possible.

Tor Browser User Survey

In addition to the above, we received a lot of specific feedback in the Tor Browser User Survey – some of which includes work that's in the backlog or on ice. I'll summarize that for the purposes of this ticket in the near future too.

marked this issue as related to tpo/applications/tor-browser#40781 (closed)

marked this issue as related to tpo/applications/tor-browser#40782 (closed)

marked this issue as related to tpo/anti-censorship/bridgedb#10831 (closed)

marked this issue as related to tpo/anti-censorship/bridgedb#40025 (closed)

marked this issue as related to tpo/web/tpo#248

marked this issue as related to tpo/web/tpo#249

added Q2 label

removed due date

changed due date to June 30, 2022

assigned to @nicob and unassigned @duncan

assigned to @duncan and unassigned @nicob

added Backlog label and removed Next label

removed the relation with tpo/web/tpo#249

@duncan I'm going to close this ticket but leave the ones related to the download page open and in the phase 5 of this project. Feel free to reopen if there is anything else that needs to be done here.

Thanks Gaba, I think we're probably good here.

closed

changed the description

Work on selected improvements to user experience on Tor Browser (desktop and mobile).

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