Firefox UX Team update: Firefox 4 progress, improving design process visibility & longtitudinal studies

What the Firefox UX team is up to this week

The Firefox UX team posts weekly updates on what we’re up to. Instead of only posting individual after-the-fact updates, we also 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

We’re changing the format a little bit this time, since we have clearer project definitions and responsibilities for Firefox 4 now. We’ll still try to describe past and upcoming work, but will be doing so in a project-centric way.

---

Status reports on current UX priorities:

Notifications

Alex Faaborg:

• Overall progress is good — the most developer-owned project Alex has right now — Dolske, Frank (intern) & Gavin working on this.
• Risk: On the home tab, we want to use the snippet for some of the content that is currently in notifications — we can’t get rid of some of these until the Home Tab has the capability to host them.
• Styling: Still very rough in the implementation, we need to get graphics to Gavin for all the platforms soon.

Firefox menu

Alex Faaborg:

• Currently on hold since we’re not near implementation yet.
• Risk: Unowned, not being worked on it until we can draw in titlebar. Dao and Gavin are both in the critical path for most of these things, which is a bit risky.
• Can we start putting the menu as a normal toolbar item for now, so we can start implementation before we draw in the titlebar? Will allow us to find the edge cases and not be reliant on an implementation detail.

Site identity

Alex Faaborg:

• Depends on Notifications.
• Current Windows build have partial support already: block + full URL, will be refined.
• Plan is to strip duplicate domain and make URL not shift. Alex will file a bug on this behavior.

Home tab & App tabs

Alexander Limi:

• Home tabs and app tabs are being worked on by Blair & Marco.
• It isn’t clear which developer is owning the content area of the home tab, getting it locally hosted.
• Limi is creating mock-ups of the detailed interactions next, as well as get some clarity on who’s handling which aspect — Home Tab vs. App Tabs vs. Home Tab content.
• Coordinating with Blair & Marco this week.

Download Manager

Alexander Limi:

• Mehdi has posted patches for moving download history into library — yay!
• Neil Deakin on the critical path here, since Download Manager will have more complex behavior than simple notifications — Limi will email him about current state and suitability.
• Seems like low-hanging fruit for Firefox 4 if we exclude the MIME type stuff. Treating as an opportunistic project if we can find people to work on it.

HTML5 form controls

Alexander Limi:

• Limi is taking over the ownership of this, communicate what we’re trying to land and how it should look/work. Make sure we’re all in agreement that we shouldn’t ship halfway working widgets — and what that actually means.
• Blizzard et al had a meeting where they identified what the top priorities should be, and what we want to ship, and in what state.
• Aiming to get back to Mounir about his bugs ASAP.
• Notify about uiwanted keyword.

“Paper Cuts”

Alexander Limi:

• All the paper cut bugs have been filed: http://bugzil.la/papercuts
• Need a second pass to clean up dupes and disconnected issues.
• Blog post with slides from talk coming (video was unfortunately not recorded properly) — slides are here in the meantime.
• Limi plans to blog and highlight work done + what should be picked up.
• Picked Startup Experience & Focus/Modality categories as important for FF4, but lots of opportunistic work here, obviously.
• Risk: “Reconstruct profile on upgrade” has no owner, as far as we can see, and is important.

Main window refresh

Stephen Horlander:

• Progress on platform blocking bugs, drawing in titlebar seems to be getting there.
• Don’t expect a lot of theme progress before end of quarter.
• Aero Glass is back on trunk.
• Markus has posted patches for tab styling & new button styles. Waiting for review.
• Risk: Is there anything we can do to get these patches approved/reviewed sooner? There will be lots of tweaking and polish needed, landing early is important.
• Posted detailed illustrations of what needs to change with regards to tabs.

In-content page design

Stephen Horlander:

• Created Mac version of the in-content design, Windows & to follow.
• Will blog about current mock-ups of Windows & Mac versions.
• Bug needs to be filed.
• Stephen doesn’t have the bandwidth to do the CSS work right now, hopefully someone else will step up to help with this.

Extension Bar

Jennifer Boriss:

• Dormant, but blog post coming to follow up on the previous post.

Add-ons Manager

Jennifer Boriss:

• Background (aka. Personas/Wallpapers) and themes view design finalized, being implemented.
• Plugin updates: Design for how to handle edge cases.
• Next: Blocklists, Cancelling installation.

Privacy

Jennifer Boriss:

• Dan Witte has been talking to EFF about the Panopticlick project — how can we limit how easy it is to identify you online.
• Site-centric UI: expand on initial mock-ups.
• Sensible defaults on third-party cookies.

TabCandy

Aza Raskin:

• There’s a tracking page.
• Started implementing with Stephen’s in-content UI, looks great.
• Vlad has patch for hardware-accelerated CSS transitions of canvases.

Post-Firefox 4 Home Tab

John Wayne Hill: (UX intern)

• Did competitor analysis of other home pages: Yahoo, My Yahoo, iGoogle, MSN, Windows Live, Netvibes, Chimp, flavors.me, UnHub.
• A lot of them are really ugly and hard to use, especially the ones based around widgets.
• Email, search, news, ads were very common — as were global Twitter trends.
• None of them did a good job at geolocation.
• Most interesting: SkyDrive/Dropbox integration.
• Started looking at using surveys.
• More research this week, design lunch was suggested.
• We’re not aiming to build a clone of any of these widget-based services, just so that is clear — it’s interesting to look at what’s popular on these sites, though.

Test Pilot shipping with Firefox 4 beta releases

• Jinghua stopped by and discussed longtitudinal studies with us.
• Ask after first day, then a bit later (15 days?).
• Closing interview at the end.
• Start thinking of what kind of questions we want to ask, as well as what data we want to measure along with it.
  
  

Other topics covered

• Is ViewVCS feed good enough for the UX repository feed, or do we need anything else from Trac?
  • Limi will set this up as part of improving design process visibility, and hook it up to Planet UX, so people get live updates on changes we make.
• We’ve been asked to contact Juan about QA test plans for any feature we’re working on, what is our plan here?
  • Juan got link to the project list, will follow up later, since there isn’t that much landing before end of the quarter UX-wise.

---

Is there anything that you think can be improved in these updates? How is the new project-centric format working out for you? Send feedback to limi@mozilla.com.