March 30th, 2010
Firefox UX Team update: Aza Raskin joins the team, sprint week planning & progress updates
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
Aza Raskin joins the Firefox UX Team full-time this week, transitioning into a new position working with us on the upcoming release of Firefox. Aza comes to us from the Mozilla Labs team, where he has worked on pretty much every project since 2008.
We’re very excited to have Aza on board, and expect great things in the areas of UI innovation as well as improvements to our outward communication. We’ve been hoping to make our work more visible and push out more demos, prototypes and screencasts in the near future — and as this is something Aza excels at, we’re stoked about being able to benefit from his talents in all of these areas.
Previous week
Highlights from previous week’s activities:
- Jennifer Boriss worked on Extension Manager redesign: experiments with regard to size constraints, error handling, blocklisting add-ons, trusted/reviewed add-ons, as well as icons & graphics for Blair McBride.
- Alex Faaborg worked on the new Firefox menu including a heat map visualization — see the excellent blog post about this, Test Pilot user interface & an as-yet-unnamed Labs experiment.
- Stephen Horlander worked on various theme bits as usual, buttons and glyphs, and just published a detailed post on how to create your own glyphs based on the new Firefox style.
- Alexander Limi published his comprehensive treatment of how to improve the Download Manager in Firefox — as well as other browsers — did some more interviews with candidates for the Labs UX Engineer internship position, and met with various people from the Labs/Product teams for updates on current and future projects.
This week’s meeting
Much of the meeting was spent giving Aza an overview of what we’re currently working on, and discussing the overall direction and design priorities for the upcoming release — and where Aza can help out, as well as the projects and ideas he’s bringing to the team. He’s been hard at work on the TabCandy prototype lately — a spatial way of dealing with information gathering and juggling a lot of open pages — and we discussed briefly how this fits with the other priorities, but will go more in-depth on this subject later.
We’re also planning a UX sprint week, where we’ll fly in Mr. Stephen Horlander and see if we can coordinate it with Madhava’s visit in the same timeframe, in the beginning of May. Dates aren’t locked down yet, but we’ll update you when we have more news on this — as well as the sprint topics.
Individual goals & focus areas this week
- Jennifer Boriss
- Finish up remaining Extension Manager work, in-content design work, helping Labs with their as-still-unnamed project.
- Alex Faaborg
- File remaining bugs, spin up the remaining work on the new notifications.
- Stephen Horlander
- Provide visual designs for: Maximize windows, full screen windows, extensions bar, cut/copy/paste icons, visual design of panels on Windows — as well as some crazy experiments.
- Alexander Limi
- All admin week: Update all project pages to reflect reality, file bugs for all the projects, set us up for Q2 goals and success.
- Aza Raskin
- Further work on TabCandy (look/play along here), figure out what the goals are for Revision A shipping in April. Continued immersion in Firefox UX Team customs & rituals.
Is there anything that you think can be improved in these updates? Send feedback to limi@mozilla.com.
