Testers were concerned that Briar showed Mailbox as connected when Mailbox was offline
Participants were complaining that even when the Mailbox device was offline, on the Briar app it looked like the connection is still working well. There were no indications that the connection is not working. They were expecting to get a notification on their Briar app device whenever there were any problems with the Mailbox connection.
This was quite concerning to them, they expressed that in everyday use they would never think to manually check the connection and they would always assume that the Mailbox is working unless they get a notification on their Briar device telling them about the problems.
The “Last connection…” indicator wasn’t enough to show them the connection problems. They didn’t know how often Briar automatically check the connection. For example, Mailbox device was disconnected 3 minutes ago but the screen on the Briar app didn’t indicate any problem it just showed the time of the “Last connection: 5 minutes ago”.
Some thoughts about how to address this:
- If the last connection was not very recent (say, more than a minute ago), show a neutral status instead of a successful status, to prompt the user to use the "check connection" button to update the status
- Show some text along the lines of "Briar will automatically check the connection to your Mailbox every hour and notify you if your Mailbox is not reachable", and maybe show when the next check is due