When adding contact at distance, remind that both users need to send link
As a new briar user, Ivana didn't find clear how to connect to other users via internet. These are the points that came up during the walk-through.. When a phone has no access to internet, or wifi, and the briar user select to add a contact, via 'at a distance' option, they are not warned about absence of internet connection...
- Should there be a message to the user that they are not connected to internet, therefore cannot use the 'connect at a distance option'?
- A sender then sends the code to a contacg via SMS.
- The recipient receives the code in an SMS and retrieves it (using copy/paste of the android phone - which to this user was not immediately clear as they were not familiar with copy/paste facility of the android phones
- The recipient then briar application, add new contact page, and pastes this code into the field provided. (To a new user who receives a code with no explanation what to do with it, it may not be clear what it is for? this presuposes some familiarity with briar app)
- Then the user taps 'continue button'. What happens next is that they get the next screen where they are given a little green 'tick' that everything was correct, and they are asked to enter a nickname for their new contact.
- However, at this point, the recipient did not send their own code back to the the person who invited them. So alhough they are given the OK by the app, this new contact (on the recipient's phone) stays in the 'connecting', or 'waiting for the contact to come online'..; and nothign else happens.
- Of course the connection cannot be established because the first user (sender) did not receive their firend's (recipient's) code at this point.
Ther was a talk on mattermost about how this could be handled in a way that guides the recipient a bit more, so that connection is actually achieved.
Suggestions made were:
- popup box before the receiving user clicks on 'Continue' - that would remind them to send their code to the person who invited them. But this wqs thought to be quite annoying to the more experienced users - hving to dismiss this popup. To get around this annoyance, they could select, maybe, a checkbox that says: 'do not show this info again'.
- another suggestion was to include a little checkbox before enabling the continue button (like the checkboxes included in webpaged to signal that the user accepts the terms and conditions). It could say something like 'I sent my own code to the person who send me their own' or whatever makes more sense; This could be easy to use for experienced users, as it woudl just be a checkbox ont he screen, but for newbies, it would be guidance to follow the propoer procedure to establish a connection.