Firefox UX Team update: Beta 1 readiness & start page videos

What the Firefox UX team is up to this week

This is an older update that wasn’t published because I managed to break my blog in interesting ways while testing the new & very excellent Plone 4 beta release. Since it happened just before the Mozilla Summit, I didn’t have time to fix it, so I’m publishing these two older updates today too. Apologies if this is confusing anyone. The date in the header is the correct date for when the meeting happened.

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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.

New & noteworthy

This week saw tabs-on-top land for Windows, and excellent work being done all around — a surprising amount of UI code landed in time for Firefox 4 beta 1.

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Status reports on current UX priorities:

Start Page video for the new UI

Alex Faaborg:

• Overall goal is to help mainstream beta testing users quickly transition to our UI changes so that they don't bounce ("where did my menu go?", etc)
• This is my top priority as we finish up beta 1
• Plan is to re-edit the video for each beta release, with it getting longer over time as we continue to introduce new features (home tab, etc.)

Notifications

Alex Faaborg:

• Currently in progress on the account manager mockups, but lower priority than Beta 1 tasks.

Firefox menu

Alex Faaborg:

• Tabs-on-top landed on Windows!
• Future work on hold until after Beta 1.

Site identity

Alex Faaborg:

• Might want to get a get mockup of this out this week.
• Lowest impact: what we have now: [site block] URL
• Moderate impact: [site block] /path
• More radical change [site block] title
• This would also address concerns about no longer placing the title in the window frame, but will highlight other edge cases.

Firefox Sync

Alex Faaborg:

• Had a meeting last week to discuss the ongoing debate of security vs. usability. Moving forward with mockups that include an automatically generated artifact for the user to save.

Tab video

Alex Faaborg:

• Press reaction was neutral (there exists a video) to positive (there exists a video, we agree with the points).
• Comment reaction was what you would expect with YouTube, Digg and Reddit.
• Limi saw a lot of awesome, finally Firefox does the right thing, FWIW

Beta Feedback button

Alex Faaborg:

• Visual changes done (thanks, Stephen!)

Home tab & App tabs

Alexander Limi:

• Meeting with Blair & Frank later today to figure out next steps and any blockers.

Download Manager

Alexander Limi:

• No changes.

HTML5 form controls

Alexander Limi:

• Did initial work on the multiple upload widget, more to come.
• Next steps: Publish the initial set of widgets, get feedback.

“Paper Cuts”

Alexander Limi:

Paper cut overview bug is here.

• Sent out email to the multi-minute startup profile people, profiles have started coming in. Keeping sdwilsh in the loop for next steps.
• Didn't get to do the Bugzilla sweep I planned. :(
• Will try to fit in some gardening this week in between main tasks.
• Any suggestions on good people to talk to about the Focus issues?

Main window refresh

Stephen Horlander:

• Drawing in titlebar landed.
• Lots of bugs and lots of fixes.
• Windows XP and Aero Basic backend coming “soon”
• Windows XP: Need to work out full window style bits.
• Bookmarks Menu Button landed.
• Mac: Buttons landed — tabs next, needs review.
• Windows: Follow-up Beta 1 with lots of polish.
• Linux Bugs filed.

In-content page design

Stephen Horlander:

• Limi & Stephen meeting Wednesday at 1pm to create the list of what pages need attention + priorities — then publish, so we can get people to help out.

Add-ons Manager

Jennifer Boriss:

• Mostly fixing beta 1 bugs, no blockers left.
• Mossop is working on wallpaper/theme selector — has implementation already, very cool!

Jetpack & the Extension Bar

Jennifer Boriss:

• Dietrich & al. working on this.
• Displays based on whether there are things to show.
• Customizable.

Privacy

Jennifer Boriss:

• Mehdi & Boriss working on the site-specific prefs.
• Mehdi posted a prototype on AMO.

TabCandy

Aza Raskin:

• Not present.

Post-Firefox 4 Home Tab

John Wayne Hill: (UX intern)

• Good amount of work done last week.
• Critique and Feedback session on Wednesday, 1pm.

Startup performance & perception

Alexander Limi & John Wayne Hill

• Didn't get the wiki page created as we wanted yet — will do today or tomorrow at the latest.
• After page is created we need to talk to particular devs on how to approach each issue and then find issue champions.

Mobile

Madhava Enros:

• Sean Martell working on android theme mockups for real this week.
• incorporating  changes/ideas from last week's discussions in Mountain View for sharing UI and “unified start screen” &home-tab-esque screen.
• 1.1 (should be!) out this week.

Feedback session

Quick feedback and/or blockers; for in-depth discussions, we do design sessions on Wednesdays.

Critique and Feedback on post-Firefox 4 Home Tab, Wednesday, 1pm.

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About the meetings

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 & 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.

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