MozCamp, Buenos Aires Saturday, April 21, 2012

Designing Firefox

¡Hola!

Correction: The user experience workshop tomorrow is at

11:30am in Storni - not at 5:15pm!

My Name is Boriss I’m on the Mozilla User Experience Team

I’m going to talk about:

• What user experience is

• Design and user experience at Mozilla (including what we’ve gotten wrong)

• The glorious future

Our focus is on how Mozilla’s products and services are perceived, learned, and used

Fixing current problems

Designing new products and features

User experience

• Design limited: based on annoyances, not possibilities

• “Averaging” user needs

If only current UX problems are considered:

“What’s your favorite color?”

Our goal is designing based on user needs

• What are users trying to accomplish?

• What are their metrics of success?

• Who are they?

Many ways of determining user needs

• User testing and interviews

• Data analysis (eg Mozilla Test Pilot & Telemetry)

• Focus groups

• Contextual inquiry

• Eye-Tracking studies/observational studies

• Analyzing feedback

User experience design at Mozillabegan after Firefox

First “user experience” at Mozilla =

hackers creating a browser for, well, them

(and this is awesome)

“Scratching an itch”is important for Mozilla, open source, hacking culture

But, we used to look like this:

ewdwe

Now, we look more like this:

(~30,000 million of us)

We can’t design for millions the same way we did for only ourselves

Partially, the UX team’s goal is to make sure that UX at Mozilla:

1. Is coordinated, cohesive, directed

2. Still happens true to Mozilla’s organic, open, itch-scratching character

Two approaches to UX design:

User Centric Design

I need...

I want...

I like A more than B!

the customer is always right!

Strong Designer

I know what you want more than

you do!

Most design teams land somewhere between

Risks:

EPIC FAILURE

Risks:

Complexity, “grey,” users lie

Historically:

Users lie!

Users lie!

So, we’re open source. We like scratching our itches.

But we also need coherent design for our millions of users.

“I love tabs!”

“Everyone uses tags,not bookmarks.”

“My mom doesn’tunderstand tabs.”

“OpenID is the future!”

“Nobody uses the ‘Go’ button.”

“There should bea preference setting.” “Add support for

BitTorrent.”

!“I only use keyboard

shortcuts.”

“Add support forOgg Vorbis.”

“That’s great!”

“That’s awful”

“The profile manager should be redesigned.”

“Closebuttons are better at

the end of the tabstrip.”

“The URL bar shouldbe removed.”

“This looks too much like Chrome!”

• Have add-on infrastructure to explore new ideas

• Elevate contributors who know what they’re doing

• Focus on design principles

Wat do?

Design Principles?

discoverability

user control

consistency

minimalism

no interruptions

new

vs

vs

vs

Beyond being well-designed, what should using Firefox feel like?

Soft Powerful

Yours

Who are we designing for (if not just ourselves)?

Our users: People whose lives or work revolve around the internet

Respecting Flow

Thursday, October 20, 11

Protect, but Don’t Lecture

Protect, but don’t lecture

• You can’t “teach people how security works”

• Maintain blacklists for add-ons & plug-ins

• Don’t ask people to do work

Be a good fit - visually and interactively -

across devices

(we don’t do this well right now)

Listen to Users!

Measure in the Field

Do What’s Right for Users No Matter Where Idea Came From

Avoid Boundary-Case Design

Questions?