Firefox UX Team update: Work week follow-ups, Test Pilot integration & intern projects

What the Firefox UX team was up to last week

Note: This is an update from last week — apologies for posting this late. A busy week — combined with the UX work week before that — means that you haven’t heard from us in a while. We should be back on a normal status update schedule this week onwards.

The Firefox UX team posts weekly updates on what we’re up to. Instead of only posting individual after-the-fact updates, we 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. Our current focus areas can be found at UX priorities for the next Firefox release.

The UX meetings are open to people from outside Mozilla — if you want to listen in, use the numbers for our conference call system and join conference room number 268 every Monday at 14:30 PST. We post agendas to dev.planning and dev.usability before these meetings.

For people at Mozilla: We are scheduling regular work sessions at 13:00 PST on Wednesdays every week — as part of this we also accept drop-in visits if you want to get assistance with any user experience task. Contact us a bit in advance to coordinate.

---

New & noteworthy

Our intern — John Wayne Hill — has started looking into his first research/prototype project: He’ll be working on the next-generation Home Tab — in other words, the version that will ship after Firefox 4 is out — and exploring things like sharing, social, and Contacts integration and other possibilities in this space. We’re excited to see what he comes up with!

One of the goals of Firefox 4 is to give you better control and insights into your privacy online. Jennifer Boriss is heading up this, and she’ll put out a blog post outlining the problems we’re aiming to solve soon. She’s already had meetings with some of the main stakeholders and domain experts in this area to get an initial round of feedback on what the problem space looks like. We’ll likely follow it up with a brownbag presentation to get wider feedback once we have enough information to share it in a more structured form.

The weekly UX meeting has also moved, it now happens at 14:30 PST on Mondays. Adjust your calendars!

This week’s meeting

Subjects covered in this week’s meeting:

• Work week results and follow-up
  • Everyone on the UX team should get their files into the svn.mozilla.org repository, and get a setup so we can keep it updated when new projects come along. Contact Limi if you need help with the initial setup or an intro to SVN.
  • Stephen Horlander: Update mock-ups
  • Alex Faaborg: Platform capabilities
  • Alexander Limi: Update project pages + general UX priorities page.
  • Stephen: Linux theme work — contact Roc + Michael Ventnor.
  • Alexander Limi: Get Trac or other RSSable setup for UX repository (ViewVCS which is already in place can probably do this).
• Project(s) for John Wayne — current thinking is the next-generation home tab, but if anyone has other ideas, please bring them :)
  • startup timeline (using OS X 10.6 screen recording, VirtualBox, Windows 7, create a chart of what happens at what ms)
  • next generation home tab (beyond simple replication of Firefox Start experience)
• Test Pilot UI — Jinghua asked what changes we’d like to do if it’s going to ship with the betas:
  • No restart required.
  • First run experience should gather demographic info
  • Bug fixes for known UX and functionality issues.
  • Solid QA & security pass.
  • Ability to re-submit results from previous studies in order to correlate with new studies
    • requires TTL policy on raw data.
  • Where does Test Pilot go when there is no status bar? Possibly right side of toolbar with a style similar to feedback button.
  • Checkbox to say “never ask me again about test pilot stuff, do what you need to do.”
  • Do they have the notion of a recurring (ie. permanent) study?
  • Knowing what we want to have tested as early as possible.
• What do we want to do for the Mozilla Summit? What we have to work with:
  • 9 main blocks.
  • Lightning talks for an hour every day.
  • Science fair: in the afternoons every day, some people staff the UX booth while the others visit the rest.
  • If we can get posters ready ~1 week before, we can get them printed locally.
  • Faaborg: Session/lightning talk/science booth on filing UX bugs (keywords)?
  • Madhava was thinking of doing something about sharing (what we can learn from meatspace social networks)

Individual goals & focus areas this week

Jennifer Boriss

(Not present in meeting, taking some time off this week)

Alex Faaborg

Launch test pilot study, Firefox button mockups for Dão, identity block mockups for Gavin.

Stephen Horlander

Make sure theme work is on track, filing new theme bugs, followup on theme issues, finish geolocation icons.

Alexander Limi

Wrap up filing of the papercut bugs, add the Download Manager bugs, project page updates, make sure John Wayne gets started on his intern project.

John Wayne Hill

Help Limi wrap up the papercut bugs, start working on the Home Tab project.

Aza Raskin

Visiting Toronto, working with people there to improve TabCandy.

---

Is there anything that you think can be improved in these updates? Send feedback to limi@mozilla.com.