February 8th, 2010
Firefox UX Team update: Ramping up for the next Firefox release
What the Firefox UX team is up to this week
As promised last week, the Firefox UX team will post weekly updates on what we’re up to. Instead of only posting individual after-the-fact updates, 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. Our current focus areas can be found at UX priorities for the next Firefox release, as usual.
Previous week
Highlights from previous week’s activities:
- Jinghua, Boriss & Limi performed the first usability study on URL bar behaviors & expectations performed in downtown Mountain View. Definitely a success, but needs a second session to have enough subjects for meaningful analysis. Limi will follow up on this, probably next week — since it’s not directly part of the upcoming focus areas.
- Both Alex Faaborg & Stephen Horlander did some major bug filing and also updated and consolidated all the wiki pages & mock-ups. Full details.
- Limi completed his Resource Packages update, now includes inline definitions of resources. The only thing missing is a defined behavior when two packages override the same path, as detailed by Laurence Rowe in bug #529208. We’re ready to get this started, look for a post in dev.apps.firefox soon for the next steps.
This week’s meeting
We had discussions around the following:
- App tabs: Handling drag events when there’s no Home tab visible
- Outcome: Surface drop zones when dragging event starts, in practice this means temporarily compressing the tab closest to the app tabs area to make room. When app tab is moved into this area, it changes shape to indicate that it’ll become an app tab.
- App tabs: Opening a new window when app tabs are defined
- Outcome: Similar to how BarTap works, don’t load the app tabs until they are activated, but keep them around. This should probably be added as a general tab capability, since we want to use this for session restore, optimizing memory use for long-lived tabs in marathon sessions, etc.
- Doorhanger Notifications: Problems with notifications from the Firefox menu
- Outcome: There won’t really be any notifications coming from the Firefox menu, major updates have a dedicated, modal window already (make sure it’s modal), everything else is site-specific, so will originate from the site area. Once we have a messaging channel (home tab), we can kill off the dedicated “you’ve been updated” page for minor updates — but keep for major versions to surface new features.
- Discussion on Linux theme defaults
- Outcome: No matter what defaults we choose to ship, we’ll need to be able to draw in the title bar. Faaborg will follow up on this, and make sure bugs are filed.
- How to handle all the bugs in a given UX focus area
- Outcome: Some discussion around using whiteboard tags to keep track, but has been abused in the past in attempts to associate unrelated bugs with a feature. Easier & more predictable to define a “meta-bug” for the feature (example) and then mark all the relevant bugs as blockers for the meta-bug. A good separation is to split it into “design bugs” & “implementation bugs.”
- Goal: Have the meta-bugs with all bugs connected for our projects by the end of the week.
Individual goals & focus areas this week
- Jennifer Boriss
- Extension manager: more mockups to do and some use cases previously unhandled, start the category association Mechanical Turk study to help determine what (if?) categories will be useful. Starting a week-long sprint for find on page — Paul O’Shannessy is willing to take up the development gauntlet but wants an outline.
- Alex Faaborg
- First draft of the Firefox menu & full Weave UI, possibly reorganize list of dialogs to kill for the Doorhanger Notification project.
- Stephen Horlander
- File more bugs, coordinate with Dão/Gavin on resourcing, designs for download panel.
- Alexander Limi
- Publish Download Manager Improvements article to site — guest starring Mr. Stephen Horlander. Get Resource Packages resourced (hah!) & post to dev.app.firefox about it. Get the results of the Test Pilot study on menu item & keyboard shortcut frequencies, if possible. File meta-bugs to keep track of all remaining projects.
This week’s activities & design sessions
The current week is mostly about getting a lot of administrative stuff in shape in addition to the design work we do individually, so there’s only one UX-related session reserved this week:
- Wednesday: Kept open for a general design session, should we need one. Nothing scheduled yet.
Let us know what you think of this new format. Anything missing? Anything that you think is redundant? Send an email to limi@mozilla.com with your feedback.
