Design Lunch: Home Tab design post-Firefox-4

Design Lunch is back this week. Back with a vengeance !

John Wayne Hill is one of our interns, working with the User Experience team this summer, and he’s working on the design of the new Home Tab post- Firefox 4. He’s looking for feedback on his ideas for the design.

For some more context on what the Home Tab is going to be, you might want to check out Alex Faaborg’s blog post “Browsing Your Personal Web”, as well as the Winter 2009 design challenge which invited people to submit Home Tab designs.

As always, the Design Lunch is at the Mountain View office, in Ten-Forward, at 12:30pm pacific time this Thursday (June 4). You can watch it remotely on Air Mozilla and/or call in by phone to ask questions; see instructions here.

Hope to see you there!

 

Design Lunch: Code review in Bugzilla

The benefits of code review are many. Not only does it help spot potential bugs, unhandled edge cases, less-than-perfectly-readable code, and architectural suboptimalities that the original developer may have missed; it also gives the reviewer a chance to learn about parts of the ode they don’t normally work on, and gives both parties a chance to learn new tricks, learn better style, and generally improve their coding skills.

The only problem is, doing code review right is hard. It’s a lot of work. If only our tools could make it easier…

And that brings us to the topic of this week’s Design Lunch, where Clint Talbert is going to talk about streamlining our code review process by integrating Bugzilla with one of two code-review tools: either Splinter or Reviewboard.

Clint will be looking for feedback on which tool to choose, on what workflows it needs to be able to support, and other aspects of the code-reviewing user experience.

As usual, the Design Lunch is 12:30pm Pacific time this Thursday, in Ten-Forward in the Mountain View office, and anyone is welcome to call in or to watch on air.mozilla.com.

 

Design Lunch: Atul Varma on Bugzilla Dashboard

Over the years there have been a lot of discussions of how to improve Bugzilla’s powerful-but-intimidating interface. Again and again these explorations seem to run aground on the jagged rocks of “Well, if we change anything, we’ll break it for all the existing users who depend on it for their daily work.”

Atul Varma has a promising approach: Leave Bugzilla itself right where it is, but use its APIs to build a new, simpler, high-level interface that abstracts away a lot of the sordid details.

And that’s the topic of this week’s Design Lunch. Atul will be presenting his “Bugzilla Dashboard” and looking for feedback on the design.

The Design Lunch will be, as usual, 12:30 PM Pacific time this Thursday, at Mozilla HQ in Mountain View. It will be recorded and broadcast on air mozilla; instructions for watching or calling in are here.

 

Design Lunch – Alexander Limi on “100 Papercuts”

Alexander Limi recently started a Reddit thread to ask the Reddit hive mind about their pet peeves with Firefox:

What I’m after is more the “one hundred paper cuts”, the stuff that annoys you on a daily basis, and that I could help with getting prioritized as a User Experience / User Interface person.

Over 2300 comments later, Limi has his answers, and those are what he will be sharing with us at this week’s Design Lunch. It will be Thursday at 12:30pm Pacific time, and will be recorded and broadcast on Air Mozilla. Call-in info is here.

 

Design Lunch this week: Test Pilot menu study results

Tomorrow’s Design Lunch will be about the results from the Test Pilot study on menu item usage. Jinghua, Blake and I will present what we’ve found out so far about what menu items are most commonly used (and how this breaks down by operating system and by mouse-clicking vs. keyboard-shortcuts). We’ll have a brainstorming session about what this data might mean for future redesigns of the Firefox menu bar, and try to come up with questions for further investigation.

We’ll also present some findings about the demographics of the Test Pilot user base.

The design lunch is Thursday March 4, 12:30pm – 1:30pm PST. The details of how to watch or participate remotely are on the Design Lunch wiki page.

 

No Design Lunch this week

No-one has submitted a topic, so there’s no Design Lunch this week. There is still plenty of time to submit a topic for next week!

 

Design Lunch this week: Reporter.mozilla.org

Reporter.mozilla.org is the site that’s used to report websites not working in Firefox. (The “Report broken web site” item in the Help menu sends things to Reporter.mozilla.org).

Reporter is showing its age and is due for a redesign, though, and that’s the topic of this week’s Design Lunch. The speaker is Aakash Desai from Mozilla QA.

The Design Lunch will be Friday this week, instead of Thursday, to avoid a conflict with Aakash’s schedule. It’s at 12:30pm PST and is brodcast on Air Mozilla. Instructions for watching or calling in are here.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Identity in the web browser: Design Lunch video

Here is the video of our Design Lunch session from last week, in which we discussed ideas for identity management in the browser.

The video is almost an hour long, so I don’t know if you have the patience to watch the whole thing… but it does open with me wearing a funny hat and narrating an imaginary legal drama. Then it proceeds to the showing off of screen mockups, followed by vigorous discussion of what the right thing is for Firefox to do in various tricky situations.

This is the first time I tried recording a design lunch using fancy cinematography techniques such as “pointing the camera at the person who’s talking”. I hope it makes it easier to follow.

You may also want to check out Aza’s blog post, which shows the mockups of potential interface designs. They should be easier to read there than they are in the video. You can also find out more at the Mozilla wiki page on the Identity project.