Firefox UX Team update: Our priorities for Firefox.next, usability studies, interviews

What the Firefox UX team is up to this week

Now that Firefox 3.6 has shipped — yay! — we thought we’d try to make some improvements to how the UX team here at Firefox communicates with the outside world. Instead of only posting individual after-the-fact updates, we thought we’ll try to post more about what we’re about to do — which is usually a bit more interesting and higher-level, as well as gives you the chance to engage with us while we’re “in-process”. It will hopefully also give you a bit more insight into how we do our work.

Every Monday, we have a meeting to start the week and look at what we’re working on for the rest of the week, and we thought it’d be a good idea to share that here on a regular basis.

Last week, we narrowed down the priorities for the next release of Firefox — which may be a 3.7, may be a 4.0 — in this document: UX priorities for 3.7, main points reproduced below:

UX Priorities for the upcoming Firefox release

• New Theme for Windows, OS X, Linux (Horlander + everyone) — includes:
  • Site identity improvements
  • URL bar improvements
  • Tabs on top/bottom capabilities
  • App menu and general menu cleanup
  • Toolbar cleanup (ie. combined stop/reload/go buttons)
  • Site-centric prefs (zoom level, geolocation permissions, other)
  • Personas testing
  • Better animation and affordances, especially when dragging tabs (drag, detach, close)
  • Improved progress bar
  • Recently closed tabs in the tabs menu
• Home Tab and App Tabs (Faaborg/Limi) — the simplest thing that can work, probably just a browser-hosted search page for the home tab for now, as well as basic support for app tabs.
• Notifications (Faaborg) — includes web app notifications from app tabs and elimination of unnecessary notifications and dialogs in the current interface.
• Extension manager redesign (Boriss) — the first part of the larger Prefs redesign, exploring content-hosted preferences and a simpler setup.
• Download Manager + MIME type improvements (Limi) — includes better defaults for common file types, cleaning up the Applications pref panel, better file type indicators, binary content (PDF, MP3, video, Office) in-browser display + cursor indicator.

Smaller side projects that could be backported to 3.6.x

• Resource Packages (Vlad/Limi until we have resourcing sorted out here) — This should be pretty straightforward, and Limi will provide numbers and pretty graphs as part of testing & evangelism. Chrome has expressed interest, I think we can get Opera on board too, once we have some real-world numbers.
• Mac installer improvements (Taras, Joel? + Limi on UI & dialogs) — includes compression-on-install for Snow Leopard, autodetecting that you're starting FF from outside of the Applications folder, etc.

Less eligible for backport, but a useful thing we can land:

• Tab matching in AwesomeBar + retiring the old URL dialog (limi)

Stretch goals

Depending on release scope and duration, we might look at these, in unprioritized order:

• Prefs cleanup to match what we do with Extension Manager, site-centric cookies/geolocation/passwords etc.
• More capable Home tab
• Improve toolbar customization UI
• Places improvements
• Improving the "major update dialog" (faaborg)
• Turn off unneeded system level notifications (growl, toast) users don't need real time updates about updates (faaborg)
• Session restore improvements (limi, faaborg)
• Reduce UI and amount of menus (everyone)
• Zoom indicator (limi)
• Recently closed tabs in tabs pulldown + deemphasize (remove?) visible tabs (limi)
• Greater control of plugins (Always load / on click / never) (limi)
• Theme change for private browsing mode

Individual focus areas this week

Jennifer Boriss

Extension Manager improvements, usability testing with Limi/Jinghua.

Alexander Limi

Download manager improvements, usability testing, Labs UX interview candidate.

Stephen Horlander

Getting Wiki completely updated and filing Theme bugs, generate design ideas for the last remaining elements (download pane, progress bar, etc.)

Alex Faaborg

Filing platform bugs for the theme, exploratory home tab work, new notifications.

This week’s activities and design sessions

The current week has the following UX-related activities:

• Monday: Design session on Boriss’ new Extension Manager UI, and where it fits in the future Prefs redesign
• Tuesday: Design session on the Download Manager, Limi will present the current work, and we will refine and see if there are other things that need to be improved.
• Wednesday: Usability testing of three key concepts that should inform our future direction around the URL bar improvements:
• Combined search and URL bar.
• Action-like functionality in the URL bar.
• Inline search results that are in the URL bar results instead of in the content area.
• Friday: Limi interviews Labs UX candidate.

Let us know what you think of this new format — this first attempt is a bit more verbose because of the list of priorities, future updates should be more succinct. Anything missing? Anything that you think is redundant? Send an email to limi@mozilla.com with your feedback.

This update will ideally be posted every Monday, but got delayed one day due to the dangers of testing alpha release software on my server. But it was totally worth it! Shiny new Plone! —Limi