Two opinions on 3.6 tab behavior

Jono DiCarlo

February 8, 2010

3:11 pm

My wife strongly dislikes the new Firefox 3.6 tab behavior (where tabs opened from links appear immediately to the right of their parent tab, instead of at the extreme right of the tab bar).

I do like the new behavior, because by keeping related tabs closer together, it reduces the amount of time I have to spend interacting with the tab-bar scroll buttons (my least favorite UI element in all of Firefox).

She dislikes it for consistency reasons: when you open a new blank tab, it still appears at the far right. So now tabs can appear in two different places, depending on where you opened them. It violates the principle of consistency, which is generally considered one of the most important UI principles. This inconsistency hasn’t really bothered me personally. I’m not sure why; maybe it’s because opening a tab through a link, and opening a new blank tab, feel like different actions to me. There’s a difference in what I’m thinking about. But I can certainly understand how it feels like a consistency violation to other people.

My wife also doesn’t like that there’s no way to change Firefox back to the old behavior without going through about:config. (If you’re interested: type “about:config” in the location bar and hit enter, then do a search for a preference named browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent and set it to True or False, as you like.)


Is it possible to opt out of social networking?

Jono DiCarlo

February 5, 2010

4:51 pm

So I hear there’s this website called “The Facebook” that is really popular with the kids these days, and I decided to check it out…

Kidding, kidding. Of course I know what Facebook is. I’ve just been choosing not to participate. The whole “social networking” thing doesn’t offer me anything I want that I can’t already do through e-mail or by building websites. (I recognize that I am atypical in this regard).

I actually tried out Facebook back when it was university-students-only. I built a profile, linked it to my friends, and then said “Well, now what? I guess I’m done.” And I never went back. Eventually I deleted my profile, just to avoid spreading outdated information about myself.

Of course, Facebook now is not really the same application as Facebook in 2004. With over 350 million users (as many as Firefox), it forms a significant part of how many people experience the Internet, and as such it shapes their expectations for how web interfaces should look and feel, as well as how their real-life relationships should be represented in software.

This was the argument given by many of my coworkers, who told me that I ought to at least try out the modern Facebook, so that I could better understand where many of our users are coming from.

So I went to Facebook and started creating an account. I entered my first and last name and email address, and Facebook showed me a page saying “We think these people might be your friends”. There were several dozen people there who I actually know, mixed in with several dozen who I don’t.

Wait a minute, How does Facebook know who my friends are?? Remember, I hadn’t told them anything except an email address at this point. I was disturbed by how much they knew about me. More than disturbed. I was freaked out.

Where did this information come from? From the old account that I deleted? Unlikely. I believe it came from my friends importing their email contacts into Facebook. My email address was in their contact lists, so Facebook looked it up in their database and, not finding me, stored a sort of “dangling pointer”. This pointer laid dormant until I entered a matching email address, at which point it sprang into action.

The part that disturbs me about all this is that Facebook had my email address in their database, without my knowledge or consent, despite my decision not to use their service.

And they had a lot more than my email address. They had pictures of me, uploaded by my friends and tagged with my name. They knew who my friends were. They knew what my friends liked. They knew more or less how I would fit into their social network. If they wanted to, they could deduce a lot of information about the person behind the email address. It would have been fairly trivial for them to figure out what school I went to, about how old I am, what political activities I have been involved in, and what advertisers would be most interested in reaching my demographic.

My friends did not ask my permission before giving Facebook all this information about me. Why would they? There is no UI warning, no legal terms, no moral or cultural expectation that they should do so. They just typed in their own email password and clicked “Find Friends”.

Facebook makes money through targeted advertising. They profit from the detailed information that they extract from their extensive social network database. I was part of that database despite my choice not to participate. It’s not too much of a stretch to say that they have been profiting off of me, without my knowledge or consent, using information about me that was given away by my friends, again without my knowledge or consent.

I don’t think that Facebook as a company is doing anything unusual or exceptionally bad. This is pretty much standard practice in the industry. Facebook is in this position simply because they’re the social network with the biggest reach. I’d have the same concerns about any one company, no matter how seemingly benevolent, having this much information about people who chose not to participate (or rather, who thought they were choosing not to participate).

I want to be able to choose what information about myself I make available on the Internet. I want to be able to control how that information is used. And if I make a choice not to participate in an organization or do business with a company, then I don’t want that organization or company storing information about me.

Where do we draw the line between my right to control my data, and the right of other people to exchange information about me? The right of social network developers to innovate?

What do you think?


Test Pilot is going to CHI 2010

Jono DiCarlo

February 4, 2010

11:35 am

Good news, everyone: The paper that Jinghua and I submitted to the 2010 CHI (Computer Human Interaction) conference has been accepted. The conference is in Atlanta, Georgia, April 10-15.

In particular, we’ll be presenting as part of a workshop called “The Future of FLOSS in CHI Research and Practice” on April 11. The purpose of the workshop is to bring together the open-source community with the usability research community, which is exactly what we’re hoping to do with Test Pilot.

If you’re attending the conference and you’re interested in meeting up with us while we’re there, let me know! I would love to meet more people in the usability research community and get their ideas on how to improve the quality of our research.


Accordion proves humans can’t multitask

Jono DiCarlo

11:05 am

I’ve been learning to play the accordion.

The process of learning the accordion has illustrated to me, viscerally, what usability researchers have been saying for years: Humans can’t actually multitask. If you think you’re multitasking, either:

  • You’re rapidly switching between two things, and doing both of them poorly
  • You’re doing one activity during the inherent downtime parts of another activity
  • One activity has become so automatic that you can do it without conscious thought, freeing you to focus on the other activity

When you’re playing the accordion, your left hand is pushing buttons to play the chords of the song and keep time, while your right hand plays the main melody on a piano keyboard. They’re playing different parts and using different interfaces to do it. There’s also a third activity, the alternate squeezing and pulling motions needed to keep air flowing through the reeds; the moment you stop doing that, the sound stops as well.

The squeezing and pulling soon became automatic; I don’t even think about that anymore.

My biggest trouble is doing the left-hand and right-hand parts at the same time. As soon as I look at a new musical score, I can fairly easily play just the left-hand part, or just the right-hand part. One activity with full conscious attention. But getting the two parts to happen together takes hours of intense practice per song. Each part demands my full conscious attention, but I am neurologically incapable of doing that. It’s like trying to run through a wall.

A way around the wall is to learn one of the two parts (usually the chords) so well that I can do it automatically, without thinking, and focus my conscious mind on the other part.

The other way around the wall is to “chunk” segments of both parts together. For example, a certain song might have the left hand playing eighth notes of G, G-minor each time the right hand plays a B-flat quarter note. I can learn that as a single chunk and then perform the song as a sequence of chunks. This essentially turns a multitasking operation into a single-tasking operation with more difficult pieces.

I’m willing to put in all this effort because music is a fun hobby and I like the way it sounds when I finally get the two hands playing together. Whereas learning a software interface (other than a game) is nobody’s idea of a fun hobby, and is generally something that people want to get over with as soon as possible so they can focus their entire conscious mind on creating their content or otherwise doing their work.

Of course, your software is a shining beacon of usability that would never require users to multitask… or would it? Does your interface ever, for instance, require users to remember some important piece of information while also navigating a maze of menus and dialog boxes? To you, that navigation may be something you can do automatically, unconsciously, leaving your conscious mind focused on the important stuff. But to users who haven’t yet memorized the chords, so to speak, that navigation still requires conscious thought, and might force the melody right out of their head.


Design Lunch this week: Javascript Modules

Jono DiCarlo

February 3, 2010

6:08 pm

Design Lunch tomorrow will feature Dave Herman presenting on the topic of Javascript modules. Dave writes:

“I’ve started working in earnest on a strawman proposal for a module system, which I believe JavaScript desperately needs.”

The design lunch starts at 12:30pm Pacific time.

During the dicussion, there will be a conference call set up, so that anyone who is interested will be able to call in, to ask questions, offer suggestions, or just to lurk and listen. Instructions for calling in are on the Design Lunch wiki page. (There is a toll-free number to get into the Mozilla conference call system, which works even from Skype.)

In the past, I’ve only sporadically turned on the conference call system for Design Lunches, but from now on I’m going to start using it for every Design Lunch. The conference room number will always be the same, 346. I hope this will make it easier for members of the community outside of Mountain View to participate.

Tomorrow’s topic ought to be of interest to anyone working in Javascript, since a good module system could make Javascript development a whole lot easier. So call in or drop by and let us know your thoughts!

Next week’s Design Lunch will feature Aakash Desai presenting on the reporter.mozilla.org update. You can find out the schedule of upcoming topics, or propose a topic of your own, on the wiki.


The Key to Stability

Abi Raja

February 2, 2010

10:58 pm

Pondering the meaning of life makes me happier and more optimistic. (I don’t mean trying to figure out the meaning of life; I already know it. I mean just thinking about it, and in particular, how it applies to my present state).

Forgetting the meaning of life makes me sad, depressed, frustrated and angry.

So, the question is how do I prevent myself from forgetting the meaning of life? Writing it down on a piece of paper that I constantly look at might help. But then, my brain would habituate to that. That’s what happened with the ‘Sit up straight, you mofo!‘ sign I have above my desk. I can’t think of a better solution but that solution seems to be the key to happiness and stability amidst the wild daily emotional fluctuations.


A New Test Pilot Study: How do we use menu items?

Jinghua Zhang

February 1, 2010

11:32 am

In the past 5 months, as a Firefox extension, Test Pilot attracted more than 12,000 active daily users to help testing our products. Over 7000 people sent their test data back to Mozilla. We have conducted 3 studies, including Tab Open/Close study, A Week in the Life of a Browser- Bookmarks study and Accounts and Passwords study. All things we leaned from our users will directly help to inform your next version of Firefox and related services. You are also welcome to download our sanitized, anonymous and aggregated data samples for your own research.

The New Study

Today, we will introduce a new study that aims to learn more on how people uses menu items while browsing. Here is what Alex Faaborg, the principal designer for Firefox thinks about this study:

“Ever since Mosaic 1.0 Web browsers have had a menu bar.
desktopPublishingEra

However, this menu bar has always illogically followed the design of a standard desktop publishing application, containing top level commands like File and Edit, even though these commands are not always directly applicable to the primary functionality of a Web browser,which is generally not limited to document creation and editing. To streamline the Firefox user interface, and to match the overall interactive design of Windows 7, the Firefox UX team is exploring collapsing the menu bar into a single “application button” when Firefox is running on modern versions of Windows.
app-button

This change will help simplify Firefox, both visually and interactively, and will also leverage external consistency with other applications that the user regularly uses alongside Firefox. However, we currently haven’t decided on the exact contents of the menu that the application button will display to the user. ”

Join the study

The goal for this study is to answer these three questions:
* Which menu items are the most commonly used?
* Which menu items are the least commonly used?
* How long do users spend exploring the menu bar contents before selecting each particular menu item? (collecting this data now will aid us in later determining if the new design makes users more efficient and effective)

We are planning to roll out this study on the first week of February, and it will last about 5 days. For everyone who is interested in this study, you will be able to see your own usage data visualized on your computer, before you submit the data. We WON’T record any personal information, such as history items. Instead, we will only count the interactions with fixed standard menu items that used across different platforms. You can also choose not to submit the data at the end or leave the study if you are not comfortable with it.

So buckle up, join us in the new study from Test Pilot!

For more detail about this study, please read the full study introduction!


What would you do with a Firefox home tab?

Jono DiCarlo

January 28, 2010

12:01 pm

For Firefox 4, we’re thinking of replacing the home button with a home tab. It would be a mini-tab, not taking up any more space than the current home button; it would still be “click to go home”, but “home” would be a special page that is always open in a tab.

If the contents of that special page are useful, this could be a great feature. Because the home tab is part of the browser, like an extension, it would be able to do things that a normal web page can’t, like use statistics about your browsing habits to show you useful things. On the other hand, if the contents of the home tab aren’t useful, then it’s a pointless feature.

Given that… what would you put on the home tab?

That’s the question asked by the latest Mozilla Labs Design Challenge, which is open right now. If you have some ideas, go check it out!


The Evil File System

Abi Raja

January 27, 2010

9:54 pm
From the iPad Programming Guide (pg 17):
Applications with the UIFileSharingEnabled key in their Info.plist file can share files with the user’s desktop computer. A connected iPad device shows up on the user’s desktop and contains subdirectories for all applications that share files. The user can transfer files in and out of this directory.
Of course, it is important to remember that although you can manipulate files in your iPad applications, files should never be a focal part of your application. There are no open and save panels in iPhone OS for a very good reason. The save panel in particular implies that is the user’s responsibility to save all data, but this is not the model that iPhone applications should ever use. Instead, applications should save data incrementally to prevent the loss of that data when the application quits or is interrupted by the system. To do this, your application must take responsibility for managing the creation and saving the user’s data at appropriate times.
Glad Apple is waging a war against file systems. They really need to go away. Humans don’t think in terms of files, filenames or folders.

Jetpack 0.8 and the Road Ahead

daniel

2:02 pm

Hello Jetpack Developers!

We are nearing the release of Jetpack 0.8, which will feature both the Toolbar and Places APIs. Jetpack 0.8 is a particularly important release because it marks the last release based on the experimental prototype we started with last year. As we wrote about last week, we have concurrently been working on a new production-quality iteration of Jetpack, with a revamped architecture that takes inspiration from all of the feedback about the prototype.

In the coming week we will be publishing more information about the new architecture, but currently, we need your feedback on our draft roadmap: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Jetpack/Reboot_Roadmap. We are looking at roughly a four month time-frame for completion of this feature roadmap. During this four month span, there are three major releases scheduled. Each will add targeted, essential features and APIs to the rebooted platform. The first of these three releases will be live about 6 weeks from today.

As we near this transition, expect an increase in communication from the team. It’s an exciting time for Jetpack!

- Daniel Buchner, on behalf of the Jetpack team.


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