How was Firefox designed? What's next for Firefox? by Dmitry
March 04, 2010 in ZURB with 2 Comments
The ZURBsoapbox with Alex Faaborg of Mozilla was absolutely hopping! We had so many folks show up that we had trouble piling into the brainstorm room this time around.
Alex started off sharing how design works in a large open source community as well as the challenges which Mozilla has faced as a company. He went on to talk about the future of Firefox as he showed us mockups of FF3.5, FF4 and FF5. A long line of questions followed from the audience at the event, as well as the Twitter stream and blog comments.
Feel free to view Alex’s slides as you listen to the entire podcast below. You can download the podcast on iTunes.
Two approaches to design
Alex started off with stating Don Norman’s two approaches to UX design.
- User Research: user studies, focus groups. Study your users, how they behave, which features they want, what they do on the site. Microsoft is perfect example of this - they design against their user needs.
- Vision Designer: Designer who has a vision of what they want to make. They are designing for the user they envision. Apple is a perfect example of this – it’s a team of designers working in secret, not interacting with users, focusing on core principles.
| Approach #1 PROS |
Approach #1 CONS |
Approach #2 PROS |
Approach #2 CONS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mitigate risk by acting on user feedback | If you’re not careful users can influence you in the wrong (complicated product with lot’s of features) | Has a potential for exponentially huge success (Apple is an example) | If the designers don’t know what they’re doing this could be a huge failure |
So which approach does Firefox take?
Alex paused before he said: “Most of the time we take the second design approach. We focus on core principles. The difference is that we’re doing it in the open source so people can join in the community. Hence we partially lean toward the first approach as well."
How does Firefox use the best of both approaches?
Courtesy of Mozilla“Remember that Komar & Melamid painting where they sent out a survey asking people what they most enjoyed seeing in paintings and tried to incorporate all these elements into one painting? Take a look – it came out awful didn't it!” Alex said.
The lesson here is: Don’t add all the suggestions from your users into your product unless you want a painting such as this one above.
“In open source everyone throws in what they think the design should be influenced by. Even though it’s hard to come to a decision that pleases everyone it’s important for Firefox that people remain engaged because that’s how we fuel all of our work.” Alex says.
“We considering every feature suggestion by going back to the drawing board and focusing on core principles.” Alex mentioned. If a certain feature or functionality does not make it into Firefox the company asks people to create a Firefox extension for it.
Alex mentioned that great contributors from open source community can turn into people who steer Firefox in the direction we want it to go. A good example of this was the logo design for Firefox. The browser was called “Phoenix” originally. A couple of designer showed up and said that this logo will not work and that “We have something better." The Firefox icon was created by these folks, Jon Hicks rendered it, and now we see it everyday on our browser.
What’s coming in FF4 and FF5?
All of us want to see what Mozilla has in store for Firefox 4 and Firefox 5. Alex discussed this in detail. The slides and the podcast walk you through all the changes in discussion for the future versions. Here are a few teasers for you:
Thinking of putting tabs on top finally.
Courtesy of Mozilla
Courtesy of MozillaTrying to change the way we think about bookmarks. “Instead of hierarchical trees and folders we’d like to give folks an ability to use all of FF interface to navigate through all the bookmarks visually. We’ll also give people an ability to sync all their data to a central location so that they can access it from any FF browser."
Courtesy of MozillaLot’s of great questions we answered as we discussed future versions of Firefox. The full set of slides can be viewed here as you listen to the podcast.
Alex - Thank you once more for giving us such a great talk!
Highlights from our past ZURBsoapbox lectures are available online at ZURBlog:
- The Cat, The Dog, and Web 2.0 by Mrinal Desai
- Tapping a Vein: Lessons from an iPhone App Startup by Bart Decrem
- Product Excellence Principles by Luke Wroblewski
- Lessons Learned: Technorati to Offbeat Guides by Dave Sifry
- Van Halen, Marriage and Crucial Mistakes by John Marshall
- $250,000 Site Sale on eBay, Killing Goats for 6 Hours, & Healthy "No" by Rich White
- Justin.tv: One camera broadcast to a website with 35 million users by Justin Kan
2 Comments
kat neville says:
Sounds like it was a great talk! It's interesting to hear about their overall vision but also their decision making on the little details, like the looks of the buttons. I'm looking forward to firefox4, and hope they will fix the power draining properly. It'll be an interesting few years for firefox, I'm sure, with chrome advertising so aggressively.
Bryan (ZURB) says:
Luke W, one of ZURB's first soapbox speakers, took notes on the event as well: http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1008
Great talk Alex. Thanks for joining us.
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