Tech Foundations: My Home Site Status area

[autumnfjeld]

Background

The My Home Pod is actively working to improve the relevancy of content on the My Home page. Adding a Site Status area or Action Area will provide users relevant, contextual info about their site.

Since this work is in active design, check in #dotcom-pod-my-home or with Jeff or Autumn for any recent design updates.

Preliminary design ideas (not final!):

As of July 16 Previous design suggestion

Let's decide what to prioritize in this tech spike: Going from this prioritization spreadsheet

• Email verification
• domain alerts
• draft states
• and more from the linked spreadsheet

Output from this spike: Working prototype for two or three "action" items.

References

• New designs for Action Center discussion in slack: p1626387756466400-slack-C01VA0R5NKY
• Medium term design explorations: pd2qGl-9y-p2
• Figma

@jeffgolenski chime in if there are any items to add. I deliberately didn't include info that is already wired up in a UI, like plan status and domain things

[jeffgolenski]

Good stuff @autumnfjeld thanks for wrangling this. For the site status area, you really nailed it with the spreadsheet above.

I think the most impactful / actionable things we can do right now are the plan status stuff and the domain status stuff. Particularly around showing problems or potential actions that need to be taken.

After that it's email. I don't know where we're at in terms of Titan mail capability inside wpcom, but I'm putting that at 3rd. While I'd love to have the inbox unread number, not sure if that's doable right now. Simply having a link to view their inbox and maybe compose an email link in my home would be great.

The draft reminder and scheduled post reminder would also be great! I'm not sure how social media would play into the status area though!

[roo2]

Some tech investigation:

Verify your email This is returned by the /me endpoint as email_verified and attached to the user object, exposed with the isCurrentUserEmailVerified selector

Domain mapping not configured issue It appears we have the has_wpcom_nameservers flag available from the /sites/$site_id/domains endpoint which indicates whether the nameservers are configured correctly. https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso/blob/trunk/client/state/sites/domains/assembler.js#L75

If the user has changed their nameserver in the past 24 hours, they may see the same issue but I don't think we can check for this programmatically, @jordesign suggested we could give users some more information in this case p1626654686001300/1626384323.458700-slack-C01VA0R5NKY

Unpublished drafts issue On the Post List page, we get the draft posts with the PostTypeList component which makes a call like so https://public-api.wordpress.com/rest/v1.1/sites/$site_id/posts?http_envelope=1&author=&number=20&order=DESC&search=&status=draft%2Cpending&type=post&page=1 (note: status=draft,pending)

[autumnfjeld]

Recent designs on the Action Center (formerly Site Status area):

WIP Figma Designs: fLQcNzdadWzo87n89Imecj-fi-2437%3A36937

[jordesign]

Unpublished drafts issue

I think this is a bit of a tricky one (in terms of the value it offers). For many users they would regularly have multiple drafts on the go - which makes this kind of notification less useful (it's less of a 'FIX THIS NOW' situation).

[roo2]

@jordesign what about a situation where the user doesn't realize that their post is still in DRAFT mode. Do you think that would happen often? I think even if it's not an emergency, it could be useful to remind the user to finish off the draft that they started

[jeffgolenski]

Just pulling over some thoughts from slack after @roo2 asked the question there:

I think this warrants a discussion on priority and doesn’t have a “one size fits all” solution. Each message would most likely deserve its own logic: Example: Notices about domains that need configuration probably shouldn’t be dismissible at all. Where-as the notices about drafts or scheduled posts should be dismissed indefinitely when the X is clicked. They should show initially after a draft has been sitting for 2 weeks I I think Worth a team chat on the call tomorrow methinks

There's definitely a hierarchy to identify here. blockers, warnings, and reminders could all live in this area harmoniously

[roo2]

raised subtasks: Email verification & UI https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso/issues/54709 Drafts: https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso/issues/54710 Domain mapping https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso/issues/54705

[jordesign]

@jordesign what about a situation where the user doesn't realize that their post is still in DRAFT mode. Do you think that would happen often? I think even if it's not an emergency, it could be useful to remind the user to finish off the draft that they started

This is a tricky one. In that specific instance - yes I can imagine it would be helpful. But I don't know how we tell if it is that specific instance? Maybe if it is a draft within a certain time period (recent drafts)?

Notices about domains that need configuration probably shouldn’t be dismissible at all.

Agreed!

Where-as the notices about drafts or scheduled posts should be dismissed indefinitely when the X is clicked. They should show initially after a draft has been sitting for 2 weeks I I think

I think that kind of logic sounds good.