User survey plan

[PalmerAL]

I'm planning to run a user survey when 1.8 is released; if you have suggestions on what to include, please add a comment below.

In the past, I've mostly based decions what features to include either based on what I would personally want in a browser, or what had the most supportive comments in the associated issue. However, now that we have a lot more users, this approach doesn't really work any more, and only a small percentage of those users ever comment or vote on issues here. As a result, it's hard to know what features to focus on, or what problems people are facing.

In order to solve this, I'm planning on creating a survey that should hopefully let us know what people want. My plan is to link to it in a couple of places:

• On the github releases page.
• In a popup on the download page (after the file is downloaded).
• In a banner on the top of the tour page.

This should hopefully provide a good balance of existing users (who are downloading a new version) and new users.

Proposed survey questions

• Where did you first hear about Min?
• How long have you been using Min?
• What is the main reason you use Min?
• Overall, how satistifed are you with Min? [this would be multiple-choice, ranging from 0-10]?
• What is the largest problem you face while using Min?
  • I'm not really sure if this is the best way to word this
• What feature would you most want to be added to Min?
• Have you ever contributed to Min?
  • [if yes] What would improve the experience of contributing to Min for you?
  • [if no] What is the main reason you have not contributed to Min?
• Would you be interested in purchasing a premium version of Min that offered additional features?
  • I don't really have any concrete plans to do this, but it would be interesting to find out

Zoho Forms looks like a good way to run the survey, but I'll have to try it out first. If you've used it before, are there any issues with it to be aware of?

If you have suggestions for other things to ask, or a better way to word the questions, please let me know!

[code-hunger]

• Do you use Min along with other browsers? (Are you using it all the time or do you switch sometimes to another browser because of some missing feature of Min)
• Which browser did you use before switching to Min?
• Why did you switch?
• What do you like/hate more compared to [The browser they choose from the previous question]?

These are mostly based on your third question, but more specific and split into different questions so that it's easier for the user to respond. Just "what is the main reason you use min?" won't be much helpful unless you compare it with other browsers.

[PalmerAL]

@code-hunger Sounds good! I think I would the first question like "What percentage of your browsing do you do using Min" with options for 100%, 75%, etc. but the other questions sound fine.

[PalmerAL]

Draft of the survey: https://forms.zohopublic.com/minbrowser/form/MinSurvey/formperma/rrLJxqQMTGnS_085MOK0ugUlegQaLf8GCO94X3cI9H4

@code-hunger (or anyone else) is there anything else you think is missing?

[code-hunger]

Out of curiosity I would add a question about the OS used 😀

[PalmerAL]

I think we can actually get most of that information from the GitHub downloads API (look for the "download_count" property of each asset), but I'll add it just in case.

[PalmerAL]

The survey was included in 1.8 (released in October), and since then, we've gotten 175 responses - thank you to everyone that participated! Overall, this was really helpful, and helped identify a lot of things that we can improve on, some of which will be included in 1.8. I'll try to go through each question, and identify any patterns in the respnoses:

Where did you first hear about Min?

There was a pretty wide variety of responses to this, and no single source really stood out - Google search, Github search, blogs, Hacker News, etc. were all mentioned. One that surprised me was alternativeto.net - 9 people mentioned that, which I guess makes sense considering that most people on that site are willing to try lesser-known alternatives.

What browser did you use before switching to Min?

Most people listed multiple browsers here, so I counted how many times the name of each browser was listed in the responses:

Browser	Count
Firefox	73
Chrome	46
Vivaldi	18
Safari	17
Opera	16
Palemoon	5
Brave	5
Waterfox	4
Midori	3
Qutebrowser	3
Otter	2
Internet Explorer	1

The main conclusion I'm drawing from this is that our audience skews to people who switch browsers frequently and are willing to use non-mainstream alternatives, but that probably shouldn't be surprising.

What was the main reason you started using Min?

I didn't count all of these, but I would estimate that probably 75% of the responses were about the minimal design, and the other 25% were about performance.

How long have you been using Min?

This field was a text input instead of a radio group, and most responses weren't very specific. For the purposes of this graph, I interpreted "couple" as meaning "2", and "few" as meaning "3":

Based on this, it looks like long-term retention is kind of low; most of the people that downloaded the browser more than year ago have stopped using it. There are a couple of possibilities for why this might be:

• The browser wasn't very good back then, so people abandoned it immediately and haven't looked for updates since.
• People gradually get frustrated with the browser (lack of features maybe?) and leave.

A year ago corresponds pretty well with the 1.7 release, which addressed a common complaint that would make the browser frustrating to use (back button), so I think the first option is probably the most likely, but the 2nd one is plausible as well (or maybe it's something else completely).

What operating system do you use?

• Linux users are significantly more likely to respond to the survey: 51% of responses are from Linux users, but only 27% of downloads are for the Linux version.
• Windows users are significantly under-represented: 55% of downloads are from Windows users, but only 19% of responses are from Windows.

How much of your browsing do you do with Min?

Overall, how satisfied are you with Min?

What is the largest problem you face while using Min?
What features would you like to be added to Min?

I was hoping that by separating these questions, we could separate what people think they want from what they actually want. That seems to have worked - a significant number of people listed different things for each question. However, there don't seem to be any obvious patterns regarding what features fall into the "problem" category versus the "like to be added" category.

I counted how many times the most popular requests were mentioned across both questions:

Feature	Count
Download manager	18
Extensions	18
Bookmarks management	17
Password manager	13
History management	5
Increased tab contrast	5
Vim mode	5
Page dark mode	4
Import data	3

There were a lot of other feature requests that only got mentioned once or twice, and a decent number of responses where I don't understand the answer; those are not included in the table above.

Regarding each individual request:

• Download management is already in the master branch, and is coming in 1.9, which should be released soon.
• Extension support (Extension support #1) is probably not doable without a lot more resources.
• I'm planning to work on bookmarks management in 1.10; there's an open issue (Bookmark organization #697) where I've listed some ideas about how to improve it, but if you have any more ideas, please add them there.
• Password manager (Password manager #391) is doable, but It's going to be a lot of effort to make sure it's secure.
• History management we should probably do in 1.10 as well.
• The tab contrast is going to be increased for certain backgrounds in 1.9; we might need to increase it further if it continues to be an issue.
• I wrote a userscript to partially implement vim mode a while ago (use vim-like shortcuts #37); If someone's interested in working on this, I think it would be best to continue developing this as a separate project.
• Page dark mode - good idea if we can get it to work reliably enough; I don't have an ETA yet (unless soeone wants to make a PR for it)
• Import data - this is really difficult to do correctly, I don't see it being implemented any time soon.

Have you ever contributed to Min?

7% answered yet; without having any other projects to compare this to, I don't know if that's a good number or not.

What's more interesting is the responses to the "What are the main reasons you have not contributed to Min?" question:

37 people said answered with only "Don't know what to contribute", "don't understand how to contribute", or a combination of the two. This suggests to me that we need to work on better explaining the contribution process, and make it clearer what kind of contributions we want. I think there's a couple specific things we should do in response to this:

• Write some basic explanations of how the different parts of the browser fit together, and how the overall architecture works
• Add a contributing guide
• Make better use of the "help wanted" tag.
• Something else?

Would you be interested in purchasing a premium version of Min that offered additional features?

27.5% of people indicated that they would be willing to do so, which is a pretty decent number. I don't have any specific plans to do this for now, but it's helpful to know for the future.

Do you have any other feedback?

Most of the responses to this were compliments (thanks!). A few people mentioned that they appreciate that the whole browser is open-source, and that they don't want a paid version; that's definitely something to keep in mind when thinking about this.

[PalmerAL]

I think the main takeaways from this are:

• Most people like the minimalism of Min, but are frustrated by the lack of features:
  • Most people use Min as a secondary browser, suggesting they have to switch back to another browser to accomplish certain tasks.
  • Responses for "how satisfied are you" are clustered around 7-9; a lot of those responses mention one key feature that's missing.

The challenging part is figuring out how to add more features without compromising on minimalism or performance; we're going to need to carefully look at every feature that gets added in order to avoid this.

• We need to do a better job with the contribution process.

• Another trend I noticed is that a decent number of people asked for features that are already in Min (viewing bookmarks, ad blocking, I think reader view and userscripts). We should probably look at where these options are in the UI, and see if there's a way to make them more obvious.

[dbfreem]

Maybe the under reprepsentation of Windows users is due to not having a windows installer. Some people may not be comfortable unzipping the file, finding the exe and then finding a place on there machine to put the application folder. This would show why alot of people download the windows version but don't use it.

[code-hunger]

@dbfreem because windows does not need to install anything. It is highly portable - you just download and run it. No installation.

The challenging part is figuring out how to add more features without compromising on minimalism or performance; we're going to need to carefully look at every feature that gets added in order to avoid this.

@PalmerAL I think that minimalism here means "tidy UI", i.e. easy to operate with and at the same time no excesive use of buttons everywhere, leaving almost all of the window space for the webpage.
More features need not be disregarded but integrated in the same fashion - easy to use while not cluttering the UI.

[dbfreem]

@code-hunger I understand there is nothing to install. The general population windows browser users doesn't understand that. They expect they click download, click accept on a couple of popups after launching the installer. After which point the brower shows up in the start menu. If a general purpose user is confronted with a zip file at the end of the download process then most will delete it and move own. So effictevly you lost your oppurtunity to win that user over to min. So you never even got a chance to show them the features of min because they failed the install process.

[PalmerAL]

@dbfreem That's a good point, and that's something I hadn't really considered until now. @code-hunger I agree there are benefits to portability, and we should try to preserve that, but I also wonder how many users actually care about that. Most other apps on Windows have some kind of installer - if we're going to do something different, we need a really good reason, and I'm not sure we have one.

I think ideally, we would have a version with an installer, which would be the default download from the homepage, and also continue to have the existing portable version available from GitHub.

@code-hunger I definitely agree about adding features; but "easy to use while not cluttering the UI" part is really difficult - people have been trying for years (decades?) to do that, and it's still really hard to get right. But you're right there's still lots of room to add features, in particular:

• I think we could do more with the task UI - when you're looking at that UI, you're not actively focused on a webpage, so a higher UI density is probably OK, and there's lots of actions relating to managing tabs that we don't offer (I still like your proposal from TaskOverlay: select several tabs and send them to another task #478, I think we should do something like that at some point).
• Adding things to the searchbar is a good way to add features, because it lets us only show information when you're actively looking for it. There's probably more we can do to improve full-text search, and possibly other types of information we can integrate into the searchbar as well (reader mode articles? dictionary definitions? etc.)

[ItsJamie9494]

@dbfreem

Maybe the under reprepsentation of Windows users is due to not having a windows installer. Some people may not be comfortable unzipping the file, finding the exe and then finding a place on there machine to put the application folder. This would show why alot of people download the windows version but don't use it.

@code-hunger

@dbfreem because windows does not need to install anything. It is highly portable - you just download and run it. No installation.

First of all, a portable app would be a single EXE file (it is possible, with some changes to the source code, Min could be portable (single EXE))
It is also really easy to design an installer, and I would be willing to, if @PalmerAL wanted to get an installer for newer releases.

[PalmerAL]

@AwesomeTech10 I've been working on getting an installer working, I'll try to post it here soon.

I'm not exactly sure what we would need to change to make it portable, do you have any ideas?

[ItsJamie9494]

@PalmerAL I've tested, and the problem is that the min: urls are trying to call C:\...\output (where I stored the exe. no other folders) \resources\...
As the resources folder doesn't exist, nothing happens, and a blank screen shows. If the min: urls were changed, it would work.

(I used BoxedApp Packer to pack the files into a single EXE)

[PalmerAL]

That might be a limitation of Electron; the Electron EXE doesn't normally contain any of the app-specific code, which all goes into the resources folder. I guess it would depend on what BoxedApp is doing exactly.