Two opinions on 3.6 tab behavior

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?

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 Eventually I deleted my profile, just to avoid spreading outdated information about myself.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.

 

Test Pilot is going to CHI 2010

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

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

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.

 

What would you do with a Firefox home tab?

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!

 

No Design Lunch this week

We’re not having a Design Lunch this week, because no topics were submitted.

If you want to see more Design Lunches, then submit a topic! Just let me know what you want to talk about, and add yourself to the Design Lunch schedule wiki page. Simple as that. Remember, design lunch is a service that we run; the purpose is to get more eyeballs and more feedback for your design problem. It can’t exist without design problems to talk about!

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for something to do this Thursday during lunchtime, I encourage you to go to Murali’s brown bag talk on risk analysis of the code changes in Firefox in 2009.

 

Test Pilot to study Firefox crashes?

Blake (who generated all the cool graphs I’ve been using to present Test Pilot results) has used the session data from the Week-in-the-Life study to form an interesting hypothesis: That Firefox crashes per user follow a power-law distribution. If true, the power-law distribution means that “mean crashes” and “typical experience” are two very different things.

I should emphasize that the Week-in-the-Life study was not really designed to look at crashes, so I’d rather do a follow-up study specifically targeting this hypothesis before I support it with any confidence. But, as Blake says:

If our crash data follows a similar distribution, the average crash per user metric tells us little about the experience of a typical Firefox user.

Anecdotal evidence supports this hypothesis. While we all know people who swear by Firefox’s stability, we also know people who complain of frequent failures.

…

With this in mind, I suggest we use Test Pilot to run a longitudinal study of true Firefox crashes.

Agreed! And it’s great to see more hypotheses coming out of the Test Pilot data!

 

Labs Night tomorrow night!

We’re having a Labs Night tomorrow evening, starting at 6pm PST, at the Mozilla Mountain View office. It’s the first one in a while.

Jinghua, Blake, and I will be presenting some Test Pilot results there. It should be pretty fun. There’s free food, too, as long as you sign up in advance.

See you there!

 

Ribbon Hero

Lost Garden is a blog worth following if you’re into usability topics. It’s primarily about video game design, but it’s game design from a psychology perspective and its insights are highly applicable to other kinds of software design as well. I first heard of Danc, the author of Lost Garden, through his presentation called Princess-Rescuing Applications, which is about how video games are actually highly targeted teaching tools in disguise, about how the sensation of “fun” comes from self-directed learning in a safe environment, and how we can apply that lesson to make productivity software easy and even fun to learn.

Now it seems like someone at Microsoft -specifically Microsoft Office Labs – has taken that lesson to heart and created a game meant to teach Office skills. It’s called Ribbon Hero. Lost Garden has an in-depth post about it here.

Even if “Ribbon Hero” doesn’t sound very exciting to you, I think this is an idea with a lot of potential and an exciting approach to improving usability of large, complex apps. I’ll be keeping a close eye on its development.

Edited to add: After watching the Office Labs video, I think one thing they’re missing in the current prototype is that the way the tasks are described to the player uses a lot of Office jargon, e.g. “change the orientation from portrait to landscape”. This jargon is in itself one of the barriers to learning complex productivity apps, so I think Ribbon Hero would be better if it described challenges without jargon, and made learning the terminology part of the game process too.