Firefox: Self-centered design?
February 27th, 2006
On a recent episode of the Gillmor Gang podcast, guest Brendan Eich, Chief Technical Officer at the Mozilla Corporation, had this to say about the usability goals of the team behind the Firefox browser:
“Every step in interaction design, everything in the user interface that involves the user having to think about what to do next or use a gesture they know, we want to make simpler and smoother. We want to get rid of intermediate steps and codify common cliches in the appropriate gestures and metaphors.”
Traditionally, the open source community hasn’t been known for it’s focus on usability. So, it struck me when Brendan made this point.
Don’t get me wrong: the open source world has produced some wonderful things. But, for the most part, they are tools intended to be used by the people who created them — what Jeff Patton has so cleverly called FUBU (For Us, By Us) design:
“So, what’s my point? I have none – at least no big point. Just these observations: developers often design good software for developers: FUBU. Other often design pretty good software for their own use: FUBU. Doing so can lead one to the false sense of belief that design is easy – and you can do it for anyone, or anyone else can do it for themselves: self-centered design.”
Brendan and the bright folks on the Firefox/Mozilla team have their work cut out for them. With more than 20 million users, it will take real effort to understand what all those users currently know and expect.
It will be interesting to see how they tackle this challenge as they move past self-centered design.
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February 27th, 2006 at 7:57 pm
You might be amused to see this pic of a “loaded” Firefox
http://splasho.com/blog/wp-content/pic.html
and the blog post about it
http://splasho.com/blog/2006/02/26/the-superbrowser/
We could say “oh no one is going to do that” but of course, someone just did.
February 28th, 2006 at 9:28 am
Hee.
What’s even more interesting is that the fully-loaded firefox contains less than 10% of the available extensions.
February 28th, 2006 at 6:21 pm
Some of Brendan’s comments about “every step in the interaction” are odd in the context of the latest Firefox version. Something as simple as the Page Down key no longer working on the Mac version is a huge oversight. For the first time, such deficiencies are driving me to find an alternative to firefox.
March 2nd, 2006 at 11:48 am
Regarding the links above for “fully loaded firefox” -It’s one thing to have the extensions “coexist” together, quite another to have them interact together- or at least be consistent with the rest of the UI which is what I don’t like about FF. It seems to me that you get overlap with functionality (especially things like tab managment and mouse gestures).
100′s of people with differing views (and abilities) on UI design and usability does not make (IMO) for a pleasant product overall.
I wholeheartedly agree with the FUBU take on FF. Even if the core browser was carefully considered- there’s no getting around the FUBU approach when considering extensions.. which, lets face it, it the reason *most* people use FF. Most people build extensions because it’s something they want or need with (appearently) little concern as to how it will fit in with the other extensions a user might have, or the UI norms of FF in general.
If anything- the FUBU leads to thousands of choices available which (in my mind) because just as problematic because then you spend your time digging though the clutter to find the extension that really matches what your want. That’s difficult enough, but then most extension developers are not marketers either- so you get (in some cases) confusing, what I call “open source-y” type names that have more letters, numbers and versions in the title instead of what it actually is. Or something super generic.. like we used to have with the “yet another….” program names. “Yet another tab manager” (I made that up, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it existed) Great, why would I want that?
March 3rd, 2006 at 5:12 pm
Having spent years trying to counter the then-dominant FUBU-AR open source “design” while working with mozilla.org at Netscape, I’m glad they are now intending to design for use by most people, though their basic designs still date back nearly a decade. I’ve always been particularly concerned about the configuration complexity, as too many design choices were left to users by allowing different behaviors controlled by preference settings. Loading about.config in my copy of FF shows over 1,000 such preference settings, with each new feature adding up to dozens more. Extensions are the latest way to push such design decisions to ‘the user’, who is presumed to be best qualified to make these choices. Given the resulting combinatorial explosion of code paths, how can such a beast can ever be made simple and reliable enough for really wide use?
March 7th, 2006 at 9:31 am
Wow – loaded is an understatement. I can’t say that the average user would go “loaded” in such a manner. In some ways it’s a love/hate relationship, as the open source community certainly wants to cater to the savy user base, but at the same time they ‘re faced with addressing the lowest common denominator of “not-so-savy” users. That’s the condition in the browser arena; if you want to play, you have to pay and both ways.
A big challenge undeed.