Webware

Mozilla Labs' Aza Raskin talks about crowd-sourcing user design.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--Aza Raskin, head of user experience for Mozilla Labs, could be considered the Doogie Howser of the Web design world.

At the age of 25, he's heading up Ubiquity--one of Mozilla's most experimental projects, along with collaborating on Weave and the concept series. This was after Raskin--the son of the late Apple Macintosh designer Jef Raskin--discontinued his pursuit of a Ph.D. to found Humanized, the company that brought him to Mozilla.

However, at a talk about design at the Web 2.0 Expo, Raskin played down his work on some of Mozilla's latest projects, instead using it as a platform to showcase why the company needs more design help from those who can spare it. "For every one employee, we have 1.2 million users," he said. Of those, about 1,000 contribute to Firefox's code, with another 100,000 or so who do the heavy testing.

But of those large numbers, few have offered design help. And in Raskin's mind, design is something that will help drive Firefox's user interface, and the UIs of other Mozilla products, into new territories. "Right now, we have two designers, so if people want to get involved, there's an ample opportunity...the work we do here can affect one of every five people on the Web."

Raskin was referring to Firefox's install base, which continues to grow, despite new and aggressive browser releases from Google, Microsoft, and Apple, all within the past year. In fact, as of this week, Firefox 3 became the most popular browser in Europe, beating out the last three releases of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which had previously dominated the region.

But what kinds of design is Mozilla looking to improve? Raskin highlighted tabs, which he says are fantastic when only a few are open. But they do a poor job of scaling, he said--especially once you reach the threshold of having close to a dozen tabs open in a single browser window. "I think we're going to see a lot of innovation there."

However, that innovation may not be coming from Mozilla Labs, which shuttered its Chromatabs project, focused on a browser add-on that would give each tab its own color, based on the site's identity.

Instead, the company has largely put the onus on third-party developers (or even competitors) to change the way we use them and build some of the best ideas into new releases.

The new page for frequently visited sites will show you which sites you tend to visit during various times of day. It also gives users the option to search and view content from each of those sites.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

Raskin also highlighted advancements in improving the browser's memory of what you've been doing, making it easier to do simple tasks by using that information. To illustrate the point, he showed off Mozilla's latest efforts in enhancing what users see when firing up their browser or opening up a new tab. Users will soon have a page that remembers the last few sites you were using and pulls in the latest items from each RSS feed.

It's no Netvibes, though. Instead, it will remember when you use each site during the day, then custom-tailor that page to show only those sites. As Raskin described it, this will keep you from seeing some of the "late night" sites you visit when firing up your browser to read news stories and check e-mail in the morning.

So what about Firefox's next big redesign? It received a few subtle tweaks in version 3, but nothing groundbreaking outside of making the back button almost twice the size as the forward button.

With Raskin at the helm, many of the biggest UI changes could be simply embedding things that used to be buttons deeper within the application. The latest proof of that is one of Mozilla Labs' recent efforts, Ubiquity, which is effectively a command line interface that can learn new site-specific shortcuts. It can also be called up and dismissed in an instant.

Is this going to be the next way we navigate the Web, though? Probably not, but in Raskin's mind, it's a design trend to build more functionality around the sites we use every day.

Update: This post has been corrected with Raskin's correct age which is 25 (not 24) as well as his role in specific Mozilla projects.

On Monday Mozilla released a new version of Ubiquity, the in-browser command line-like utility. While mostly a "stability" update, the add-on has undergone considerable cosmetic change as well, sporting a new dark plastic look. This look can be changed by anyone as part of a new styling system that uses simple CSS. Presumably, user-designed themes will go into an add-ons site as the product matures.

In addition to its new look, Ubiquity now borrows a few features from Firefox 3's "awesome bar." It remembers some of the commands you've used in the past and will let you hop to them right away when starting a new command. For instance, if you frequently use the integrated Wikipedia look-up, simply typing "w" into Ubiquity will pull it up as one of the top search options.

If you haven't yet tried Ubiquity I'd recommend giving it a spin with this update. It's come a long way since earlier releases and can be genuinely useful if you take the time to learn some of the commands. Future releases will no doubt smooth out that learning curve and make it a little easier for the less tech-savvy to approach. Along those lines, Mozilla is at work on a version that lets you pull it up and pick out menu commands with your mouse, just like a contextual menu.

The new version of Ubiquity has a dark plastic-like look and is much faster than previous versions. Click image for larger version.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

On Monday, Chris Beard, vice president and general manager of Mozilla Labs, posted a rather vague, yet optimistic, blog entry about opening up Mozilla Labs projects to the Web community at large. The move comes just a week after the company lost Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla VP of engineering, to Facebook.

Beard has coined it a "concept series" and included three videos of products and services currently at a the conceptual level and not yet ready for public consumption. Of the three embedded in Beard's post, the most buzz-worthy was the mobile version of Firefox, which surfaced two months ago. The other two are a little more out there, with a bookmarks visualizer and what is seemingly the most complicated-looking interface demo ever done by the folks at Adaptive Path for a project called "Aurora" which was unveiled last night.

To get involved, Beard is asking users to keep their ideas structured into one of three buckets:

Ideas
It all begins with an idea. A sentence, paragraph, or even bullet-points kick-start the process. Ideas can be simple and non-technical. It should be easy for anyone and everyone to help shape the future of the Web. So throw your notions, inspirations, dreams and visions out to the community.

Mockups
Turn your idea (or someone else's) into an image, sketch or video. Words are great, but you know what they say about pictures. Mockups offer up a visual and communicate ideas in terms that are just a bit more polished and real. They draw the next person in, tempting them to pick up the concept and run with it.

Prototypes
A prototype is interactive. Feel, touch and play with developing concepts. Prototypes get ideas across by showing off the moving parts. They aren't always fully functional or pretty, but they're more than a static image or two. They're a dress rehearsal of sorts, with minimal programming. Make a prototype in HTML, Flash, or whatever puts things into action.

Mozilla is also using tags on popular Web services to let people post up their mockups, the first of which have already shown up on Flickr.

I've embedded all three concept videos below. The aurora one is in HD only if you watch it on Vimeo, so click here to see it in it's full-resolution glory.