Mozilla Labs University Design: Fall 2009

There is a common problem nowadays that people tend to forget the URL of websites that they had previously visited. While there are already solutions to this (such as the Browser History and Firefoxs AwesomeBar), none of them are perfect and still pose problems. For this project we had develop a concept to fix this problem and eventually make it into a working prototype. Firstly, we had to conduct user research to find the requirements of such a system. What do the users want? What problems were the users having? Etc. For more detailed blog posts about our user research, visit the links below: http://ixdstudio2009.ning.com/profiles/blogs/user-research-3 http://ixdstudio2009.ning.com/profiles/blogs/assignment-2a-3 From our research, we found out that everyone had their own little problem with the current Browser History; however the most common problems were that: - Users tended to get overwhelmed by the list of sites in the Browser History - Users wanted to have a more visual means to recognize websites We also found some other interesting results: - Everyone used Google to attempt to find previous URLs - Bookmarking feature is very useful (though only if bookmarked in the first place) - Even though there are many features in the current browsing history, most people didnt even know they existed - Some users preferred to work with something they were familiar with Taking these results into account, we proceeded to design a concept and ended up with a design that had these features: - A 3D rotating view with thumbnails, designed to help the users easily scan through the list of sites. - Favorites and Most Visited columns on the right for easy access. - Options to sort by Date, Alphabet - A search feature - Obvious buttons - Thumbnails can be shrunk (into icons) or expanded - Options to change views depending on user preference (can change to a classic list view for example) - Timeline filter to help filter results via time periods (so user doesnt get overwhelmed) This is our current high fidelity prototype, with the removed timeline filter feature. A number of other features were not implemented as well, though that was only due to time constraints. It was impossible to do the 3D rotating view in JavaScript so we had to settling for the flat 2D view.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Final
• Edition