April 20th, 2010
Firefox UX Team update: Fennec, CHI & 100 Paper Cuts
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
Several great blog posts this week: Stephen Horlander gives us in-depth treatment of the new theme stuff that has landed or is close to landing, Alex Faaborg on the Firefox-related research at CHI 2010, Madhava Enros on the new Fennec start page. If you want to subscribe to the UX Team’s writings, visit Planet UX.
Limi is giving a Design Lunch talk this Thursday at 12:30 PST based on the feedback from the 2300+ comments in the Reddit thread he started on UI issues in the current release of Firefox. From the session description:
- 7 main focus areas that we can — and should! — improve for Firefox 4.
- Why we sometimes focus on engineering when the problem is solvable in different — and cheaper — ways.
- What we think are the issues aren’t necessarily what our users are unhappy about.
- Why feedback systems with reputation management and voting are a whole different game.
The talk will be streamed live at Air Mozilla, and will be recorded and put online later, along with the slides.
Previous week
Highlights from previous week’s activities:
- Jennifer Boriss worked on Extension Manager redesign, mainly blocklists and manual checking. Finished first rounds of the upcoming Labs cooperation project that still has no name.
- Alex Faaborg worked on the Weave first-run experience to improve sign-up success, notification work, and spent most of the week attending the CHI 2010 conference.
- Madhava Enros worked on wrapping up the Fennec 1.1 release — yay! — attended the Mobile team work week, blogged about site menu. He also had meeting with Labs about Contacts, account manager, etc.
- Stephen Horlander worked on various theme bits as usual, finished up the notification work, theme bugs for Mac (landing soon on trunk!), Personas.
- Alexander Limi had meetings with the product group to flesh out UX Team goals for Q2, and a new process for getting ideas from UX to the rest of the team. He worked on the UI for the Weave iPhone client, in particular the sign-up experience and built-in browser, prepared a talk for this week on the “100 Paper Cuts” of Firefox based on the 2300 comments in the feedback thread he started on Reddit.
- Aza Raskin worked on Tab Candy, and the Firefox Add-on Builder (“Jetpack builder”) UX review.
This week’s meeting
THis week, we got an overview of what happened at the CHI 2010 conference that Faaborg attended, we discussed overall product direction and a new process for surfacing ideas to the product drivers and product group. We’ll be continuing this roadmap and Q2 goals refinement this Wednesday, since there’s a lot to talk about.
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 also identified a couple of team actions over the upcoming week:
- Brainstorm how we can measure perceived performance, so we can get some of the harder-to-measure performance tasks fixed.
- Identify bugs from the polish categories in Bugzilla that are relevant for the “100 Paper Cuts” project for Firefox 4.
Individual goals & focus areas this week
- Jennifer Boriss
- Work on Herdict with Labs, better error handling for the Extension Manager.
- Alex Faaborg
- Geolocation work, blog posts.
- Madhava Enros
- Planning Fennec 2.0.
- Stephen Horlander
- Update the theme timeline and work on the remaining items for the new theme.
- Alexander Limi
- Get UX roadmap in better shape, give Design Lunch talk on Thursday on the “100 Paper Cuts” we should fix, and get more bugs filed and give feedback on Justin Lebar’s draft spec for Resource Packages.
- Aza Raskin
- TabCandy UI refinements.
Is there anything that you think can be improved in these updates? Send feedback to limi@mozilla.com.
