April 7th, 2010
Firefox UX Team update: Product-level roadmaps & Test Pilot 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
Resource Packages gained some traction this week, with a talk at the Developer Summit here at Mozilla that focused on Web Caching, and what browsers can do to improve the current state of performance on the web. In attendance were engineers from Yahoo, Google, Palm, Facebook, Twitter & Microsoft Office Online. We expect a report from the team that organized this later, but it seemed to be a success, and it's great to have these connections in place, and hopefully repeated over time — we're all interested in making the web faster and more mindful of resource usage.
We also had a good meeting with the Test Pilot team this Monday, and set up a regular meeting schedule to ensure that they are always on top of what we need in terms of data and studies to make more informed design choices. Our next couple of studies will be focused around toolbar usage — buttons, clickable elements in the main window — and after that we'll look at Preferences.
Also on the list of awesomeness: Test Pilot 1.0 alpha releases went out this week, congratulations to the team! We love our Test Pilot team. Buy them cookies. And if you haven't installed Test Pilot yet, you should!
Previous week
Highlights from previous week’s activities:
- Jennifer Boriss worked on Extension Manager redesign: bugs, updating manually and error messages. Started in-content sprint.
- Alex Faaborg worked on notifications, and was out sick for a few days.
- Stephen Horlander worked on various theme bits as usual, buttons and glyphs, the rest of the visual design polish issues.
- Alexander Limi interviewed 3 candidates for various positions in Labs and for a UX Team internship; and mostly did administrative stuff as predicted: filing bugs, following up on older issues, organizing upcoming work. He also prepared a talk on Resource Packages for a talk at the Developer Summit on caching.
- Aza Raskin worked on finishing up his transition, refined group interactions in Tab Candy, and redesigned his blog for better engagement.
This week’s meeting
A short update this week — not because there wasn't a lot of activity, quite the contrary — but because we spent most of the meeting talking higher-level product strategy as part of the renewed focus on outlining what products should be prioritized, and where we want to focus our efforts over the next couple of years. It was a very productive discussion, and resulted in a good list of recommendations that we will discuss with the Product team (Mike Beltzner and Jay Sullivan).
This is part of our goal around making the UX team a more active driver of product directions, and finding a good balance between working on near-term goals as well as projects we want to prioritize for the future of the web.
We're excited about this, and hope to share something more substantial with you soon.
Individual goals & focus areas this week
- Jennifer Boriss
- Continuing the in-content sprint, start prefs planning, remaining bugs in Add-ons Manager, some planning for Personas, getting ready to land the redesign.
- Alex Faaborg
- Sketch out geolocation in terms of site identity, notification, and site preferences. Meetings about our new full screen UI, possibly sit in on a few Weave user studies being done by Labs.
- Stephen Horlander
- Mostly focusing on the new full screen view this week.
- Alexander Limi
- Meet with the people working on the iPhone/iPad sync client, figure out what remains, and deliver some wireframes and recommendations, so we can get to a first release. Pick up leadership on the Home/App tabs project, and get bugs filed.
Is there anything that you think can be improved in these updates? Send feedback to limi@mozilla.com.
