Open Design Lunch video — Fennec Bookmarks

For the past few Thursdays we’ve been doing something called an “Open Design Lunch” at Moz. We’ll pick a design problem that somebody’s working on and brainstorm it informally while munching pizza and burritos. Asa has been broadcasting these events on air.mozilla.com.

At today’s Open Design Lunch I brought up the question of how bookmarks should be accessed in Fennec. Bookmark management on Fennec gets extra tricky when you have hundreds (or thousands) of bookmarks from your desktop computer getting synced onto your mobile phone; so this problem is closely related to the UI design of Weave. My previous attempts to design a bookmarks UI haven’t solved these problems to my satisfaction.

The conversation didn’t conclusively settle anything (of course) but it brought up a lot of good ideas that deserve further investigation. Here’s the video:

(Note: These videos use the cutting-edge <video> tag from HTML 5, so they may not work for you unless you have the latest version of Firefox or another standards-compliant browser.)

Keisuke Says:

February 13, 2009 at 9:45 am

Oh man – all the munching sounds made my super hungry.

I think there’s a big assumption made here that the person who is juggling a computer and a mobile device always wants to go to the same URL that happens to be stored as a bookmark.

A real life example:

When I’m on my laptop at home getting ready to commute to work by bus I go to nextbus.com. Of course I do this often so I bookmark the exact page that is useful to me. The specific page I’m talking about displays where the buses are on Google Maps in near-real-time – eg: http://tinyurl.com/dz7fz5

When I’m waiting for a bus at the bus stop on my commute back from work, I go to nextbus.com on my iPhone to see when the next bus is going to arrive. Again, I do this often so I have a bookmark for this. The page is a mobile-specific one that consists of mainly text that is served only to mobile browsers. Also, the page is aware of the stop I’m at, the bus I want to take, and the final destination of the bus.

If it ends up that both bookmarks end up on both my laptop and mobile device then one of the bookmarks on each platform would be totally useless/noise to me because it is either out of context to my life at any given time or the display of the page would be not optimal to the platform.

So to finish up, given:

A) both mobile and desktop have the same bookmarks
B) mobile contains a subset of desktop bookmarks
C) some mobile bookmarks are shared with the desktop and some desktop bookmarks are shared with mobile
D) mobile bookmarks and desktop bookmarks never mix

I think the video showed detailed conversations focused on A) and B) but I think the sweet spot is C). What’s cool about a design that would support C) is that then the system can be configured to behave like A), B), or D) based on user preference.

I haven’t been following Weave/Fennec that closely so please ignore if this point has been brought up and discussed elsewhere.

Open Design Lunch video — Fennec Bookmarks « Not The User’s Fault | Buy Cheap Microsoft OEM Says:

February 14, 2009 at 11:41 pm

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