Firefox UX Team update: Guest stars & extracurricular activities

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 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.

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New & noteworthy

For people outside of Mozilla: We have opened up the UX meetings 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 13:30 PST. We’ll post agendas to dev.planning and dev.usability up front for 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. The doctors are in, office hours are in effect! Sending us an email up front with materials will make it easier, and also lets us plan accordingly. We’ll usually meet in Zombocom, Warp Core, or in that area, depending on which rooms are available.

Previous week

Highlights from previous week’s activities:

• Limi mostly worked on an upcoming post on improving the Download Manager, which should be ready this week. He also posted the final draft of the Resource Package specification — including defined behaviors around overriding and duplicates. It’s now ready for building into a prototype, and was posted to dev.platform as well as people from the Google Chrome team. We’re also asking for feedback from some of the largest web sites out there on the spec.
• Alex Faaborg put the Weave UX work on hold, and focused mostly on the new notifications. Figured out ways to deal with app-level notifications, and met with marketing to discuss how the notifications affects their messaging now that we're transitioning to having less dedicated update pages. Still filing bugs related to customization and cursor changes. A thread on dev.platform was posted, and you can track the meta-bug for the theme work here.
• Jennifer Boriss — Set up study on add-on categories, Mac installer simplification start, find-in-page animation sprint start, extension manager redesign (install use cases, weave integration), recruiting at Interaction10 in Savannah.
• Stephen Horlander got sick, so slow progress last week.

This week’s meeting design session

There was no Monday meeting this week because of President’s Day, but we have a guest star from Toronto and the Firefox Mobile team visiting — Madhava Enros. We did a working session on unifying our directions and exchanging ideas and improvements that are relevant for both desktop & mobile. Among the subjects covered:

Syncing up concepts between Fennec and Firefox

We discussed generally about the need to carry design ideas between the two platforms, the need to keep things conceptually consistent, but also which areas should be different on purpose, since the way you use the two platforms is somewhat different. As an example, text input is more painful on a mobile device, so showing a bit more info and more navigation abilities — e.g. automatically expanded AwesomeBar results — makes sense.

Identity & security UI

Outcome: We want a consistent color scheme and approach for EV/SSL handling between the platforms, so the experience you have with security and identity carries over. Discussed opportunities to make both platforms better.

The unified “Firefox” menu & mobile

Outcome: The new, unified “Firefox” menu planned for the next version actually makes it easier to make the mobile version consistent with the desktop version. Of course, the contents of the menu will be somewhat different — less focus on printing, saving, and other device-specific operations — but overall we should be able to carry across the menu structure. On mobile, it will be implemented as a list of tiles, which scale to both landscape and portrait orientations.

Windows 7 mobile

Outcome: General discussion on the newly announced Windows Phone 7 Series, and its “intensely typographical” user interface. Microsoft seems to have sold everyone on the idea that they dropped everything and rewrote from scratch, but it's actually still mostly the same on the backend — so Fennec is in a good position to capitalize on this possibility quickly. Interestingly, Pocket IE doesn't really match the rest of the platform, and we believe Firefox Mobile can offer a much better and native-feeling mobile browser than what currently ships with the OS.

Favicon is a stand-in for URLs on mobile

Outcome: Fennec shows title instead of URL, so the favicon has increased importance in how you establish which site you're on. On the desktop version, we're currently removing the favicon from the URL bar and only showing it in the tabs, so there will be a difference here. Some discussion around various other approaches.

Combining favorites and “read later” functionality

Outcome: On a mobile device, a lot of the bookmarking activity is actually of the “Oh, this looks interesting, but it's 60 pages and I don’t want to read it on my phone” variant. Discussion around how we can enable a seamless experience here, using Weave as the central component.

Downloading on a mobile device

Outcome: Downloading files on a mobile device is less common, even if some platforms — like Maemo MeeGo — support it. Limi raised the idea of marking a file as something you want to download, and making the actual download happen on your desktop or laptop computer instead, using Weave as the mechanism for synchronizing this. So when you get back to your computer, there are some downloads already queued up.

First-run experience on Fennec

Madhava asked for some help in improving the first-run experience on Fennec. It currently has some discoverability issues, we suggested showing the UI on the edges, sliding it out of the way, and letting people discover it that way — instead of trying an abstract representation of the UI as is done in the current animation:

Individual goals & focus areas this week

Jennifer Boriss

Add-ons manager redesign (extended view, multiple screenshots & developers per add-on, personas integration), deploying study on add-on categories.

Alex Faaborg

Picking up Weave work again, continue filing theme bugs, clarifying and evangelizing with the platform team.

Stephen Horlander

Got sick last week, so essentially working on the same stuff as last week: File more bugs, coordinate with Dão/Gavin on resourcing, designs for download panel. Also adding theme resources to the upcoming design repository.

Alexander Limi

Get Download Manager article published, start specifying Home & App tab interactions. File more meta-bugs to keep the projects gathered under one bug. Get Test Pilot results from the menu study — scheduled to be ready this week, according to Jono. Also: Interviewing some Labs UX candidates.

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