Context offers fodder for innovation. Hidden in the physical work space, in the users' words, and in the tools they use are the beautiful gems of knowledge that can create revolutionary, breakthrough products or simply fix existing, broken products. —Jon Kolko, Thoughts on Interaction Design I’ve been talking with my colleague Jinghua Zhang, the project lead for Mozilla’s Test Pilot program, about the usefulness of ethnography and qualitative research in user interface design, and it seems like something that could both strengthen Mozilla’s community and help make our products easier to use. ... Read more

I’ve heard some talk lately, primarily from Henri Sivonen, regarding whether Google’s notion of an Installable Web App is “webby”. I am not sure exactly what webby means, but if I had to guess, it would involve the kinds of qualities that Mitchell Baker and Mark Surman believe make the web better: more transparent, participatory, decentralized, and hackable. Though I’m not fully sold on these newfangled apps, I can think of three ways that they could make the web better. ... Read more

I recently wanted to create a short, two-minute and thirty second “pitch” for the Herdict-Firefox integration prototype I’m working on with Jennifer Boriss, Laura Miyakawa, and Jeffrey Licht. Here is the result. It turned out that the pitch itself was an experiment for me: after fiddling around with Screenflow and iMovie for a bit, I got frustrated with their limitations and decided to just use HTML to put together the presentation. ... Read more

Every time I think about why I like the open web, I basically think of how well it fits with the way I learned to use and program computers as a kid: my first computer, an Atari 400, came with everything I needed to do programming, and I (or my parents) didn’t have to spend hundreds of dollars or sign an NDA to get a development tool. My favorite technical book as a child was Creating Adventure Games On Your Computer, which contained plain BASIC code for games that you could play, augment, and make your own. ... Read more

Over the last two weeks, I gave two tutorials to our Design Challenge students. The first was called Engineering Prototypes, and centers on the most challenging part of working on prototypes for me, which is the balance between expediency of implementation and robustness. Prototyping involves prioritizing the former over the latter, but it’s unwise to throw engineering principles out the door: for instance, a prototype that constantly crashes or runs slowly may not be usable enough to dogfood, and one whose implementation is poorly designed can be difficult to iterate and evolve. ... Read more

We want to make Ubiquity awesome at reporting errors. In our original release, a transparent message with JavaScript exception information was displayed, which wasn’t very useful to the average user, and was downright annoying when dozens of exceptions were logged in the same instant. At present, running a command that raises an error just results in that message being logged to the JS Error console, which very few people know how to access—so most people are left scratching their heads and wondering why their command is taking so long to run. ... Read more

Mike Beltzner recently wrote an excellent blog post that puts the newly-released Firefox China Edition in a cultural context: I'm used to a very search-based culture, and was shocked to discover that search - while still important - was a secondary task for all of my Chinese colleagues. Their normal pattern would be to first visit an authoritative source (a portal of some form, either a media hub, a news site, or a topic-oriented site like one for music) and then drill into the information presented. ... Read more

Last night we held a really fun Labs Night at Mozilla’s Building K in Mountain View, California. The Thunderbird team was here for their work week, some folks from Seedcamp dropped in, and Dion and Ben of the Ajaxian and the new Mozilla Developer Tools Lab were all here, which made for a night of innovative presentations that got lots of interesting conversations started. The evening started out with Jono presenting a quick overview of all the currently active Labs projects while wearing a large sombrero. ... Read more

Farhad Manjoo recently wrote an article on Slate promoting the notion of online businesses like Facebook charging people for services. It’s an interesting business argument, but I wanted to address this situation from a more social perspective. There’s some notable differences that emerge when I compare my two favorite web-based businesses, Google and Amazon. I feel very comfortable in my relationship with Amazon, largely because I understand how they help me and how I help them: I give them money, they give me goods or services. ... Read more

A few weeks ago, I made my first screencast—a pitch for Ambient News on the Mozilla Labs Concept Series: The screencast was recorded with Vara Software’s ScreenFlow; the title cards were composed in Adobe Photoshop CS3 and typeset in Helvetica Neue light. I thought I’d write a few notes about some of the thoughts and experiences that went into the making of this. I intentionally gave this video a target run-time of 45 seconds. ... Read more