Firefox UX Team update: Work week, Paper Cuts revisited, Tab Candy & Social Home Tab

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

The UX team will have an on-site work week from May 10–14 in Mountain View to work on the roadmap for the upcoming releases of Firefox from the UX side of things, and to have more impact on the products strategy in general. We expect to have a more detailed agenda posted next week.

Madhava is also visiting us next week from Toronto, so expect mobile strategy and UX scheming and plotting as well.

Previous week

Highlights from previous week’s activities:

• Jennifer Boriss worked on add-on manager (manual update, personas, themes, various edge cases), Amazon Mechanical Turk tests for Europe, Herdict/404 design (meeting next week).
• Alex Faaborg worked on notifications, JavaScript alerts and prompts, got all of the usability heuristics added to Bugzilla as keywords.
• Stephen Horlander worked on theme wrangling and Linux updates.
• Alexander Limi gave a Design Lunch talk on Thursday on the “100 Paper Cuts” we should fix, got more bugs filed and read through Justin Lebar’s draft spec for Resource Packages.
• Aza Raskin worked on Tab Candy.

This week’s meeting

Subjects covered in this week’s meeting:

• Extension manager redesign is in the process of landing on trunk, hopefully this week. Will need icons.
• Site prefs can land separately from a Prefs redesign.
• Have a link in the Site Menu to Site Preferences.
• Show password/geolocation in the Site Menu, but only if they have been set.
• Boriss should have a first draft of the prefs redesign ready next week.
• AwesomeBar styling should receive a minor facelift, less bold + underline + visual noise.
• Prefs redesign project, and a high-level Firefox 4 discussion.
• “100 Paper Cuts” feedback and updates.
• Heuristic ux-* evaluation keywords now active in Bugzilla.
• HTML5 form controls need UX work — Limi has started work on multi-file upload, can take more active role.
• Quick discussion of a potential Android mid-size tablet/multitouch/slate strategy, will expand on this during upcoming UX work week brainstorming.
• Start with a solid full-screen implementation.
• Becomes the tablet/slate UI once we add the hardware indicators.
• Demo of TabCandy stacking.
• Discussion around introducing people/locations search as part of the search box. Make it navigation-based in location bar, preview-based in the search bar?
• Some ideas around social were discussed — capture links shared over Twitter/Facebook on home tab? A “social Read Later” + automatically bookmark stuff you share out?

---

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