March 11th, 2010

Firefox UX Team update: Expanded roadmap, projects & Work Week outcomes

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.

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 13:30 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

Two blog-related pieces of news this week, we have set up a dedicated aggregator that gives you the ability to subscribe to everything going on in Mozilla & Firefox User Experience — without having to subscribe to individual blogs or gorge on the firehoses that are the Planet Firefox or Planet Mozilla aggregators. Point your web browser or preferred feed reader at ux.firefox.com to keep yourself up to date on all things UX from the Firefox team. We also added a new, slightly whimsical blog called From the Bikeshed, a place where the User Experience people at Mozilla give you a little behind-the-scenes look and links to stuff that tickled our brains.

Previous week

As usual, we got a lot accomplished during the Firefox Work Week which — for those of you unfamiliar with this event — is a week where all Mozilla’s remote employees that are working on Firefox fly to Mountain View and much awesomeness ensues. In addition to cooking classes (there’s a metaphor joke in there somewhere) and general shenanigans, the UX team planned out an exhaustive project list as well as a preliminary roadmap for when to land which elements of the work we are doing.

We also had several design sessions around improved EV/SSL and location bar design, toolbar behaviors, Firefox menu redesign — aided by the awesome data the Test Pilot team has given us in this area, as well as wrapping up more detailed issues with existing designs.

There was also quite a bit of theme hacking done by the Firefox team during Work Week, and new buttons and some initial implementations of the new progress bars have landed on trunk, and should be in the nightly builds by now.

UX project list for Firefox.next

All the teams working on Firefox were encouraged to make their projects as granular as possible (within reason), so the UX team got busy defining the work going into Firefox.next as the following projects:

This should be the exhaustive list, and if you see anything missing that you know is supposed to be part of the upcoming release and needs significant UX work, let us know.

These projects will be added as Firefox project pages over the coming week.

Roadmap & phases

We also started sketching out a phase-centric roadmap — tongue firmly in cheek, we named them “Acts,” as to not be confused by existing terms already in use for other parts of the project, like “milestones.”

The roadmap is of course subject to change — and not at all exhaustive in this particular summary — a more detailed version will be posted as part of the general Firefox project pages. Here’s a quick example of the various chunks of work we expect to group things in:

Act 1: The Big Changes
Landing new theme graphics.
Tab structure work and new capabilities.
Initial work on our respective “side projects,” but the menu bar is still present on Windows Vista/7.
Improved default behaviors for downloads.
Act 2: The Hard Changes
New Firefox menu, drawing in titlebar capabilities.
Home tab.
App tab behaviors.
Improved notifications.
Add new download panel, improved download history.
Act 3: Tying Things Together
New toolbar buttons: bookmarks, downloads, developer, full screen.
Menu cleanup, remove menu entries that should no longer be there, add missing ones.
Security review for new download behaviors, integration & polish.

{{ Insert mythical Firefox.next ship date here }}

Act 4: Encore — Hey, turns out we have more time, off to The Future
Improved and unified Customization UI.
Preferences reorganization and improvement.
Download cursor work, inline previews.
Spin up Slate UI project.
Spin up multi-user Weave design work.

This rough roadmap allows us to prioritize certain aspects of our work, the main goal is that it allows us to talk about our work in clearly defined phases. That being said, it is only a guideline, and shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Contents may settle during transportation, void where prohibited, et cetera.

This week’s meeting

A short weekly meeting this time, since we’re all wrapping up the great work that was done during the Mozilla Work Week. Most of our time this week will be spent on completing the project pages, filing even more bug entries to organize our work, and generally get things in shape for Firefox.next. Of course, we are all working on our projects in parallel — so expect more details to trickle out along the way on our respective blogs.

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

Alex Limi makes software easier to use. Founder of the Plone project, he currently lives in San Francisco, and previously worked at Jarn & Google .

He’s currently Firefox UX Lead at Mozilla .

“No amount of genius can overcome a preoccupation with detail.”
—Marion Levy

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