UI Designers Hired by Mozilla

ta bu shi da yu writes "Mozilla has hired several developers from Humanized. According to Ars Technica, Humanized is a "small software company that is known for its considerable usability expertise and innovative user interface design. The Humanized developers will be working at Mozilla Labs on Firefox and innovative new projects.""

More Raskins

[by Anonymous Coward]

Humanized is Jef Raskin's son's company. The kid has been living and breathing UI design his entire life. Looks like Mozilla picked a good one.

Re:More Raskins

[$RANDOMLUSER (804576)]

Yeah. Clearly the guy who invented holding down the Caps Lock key and typing "open firefox" to start firefox (real example from their home page) is a UI genius.

Re:More Raskins

[wampus (1932)]

In Vista I mash the Windows key and type firefox. I got into that habit VERY quickly.

Re:

[ByOhTek (1181381)]

In Windows Vista I upgrade to Windows XP or FreeBSD. I got into that habit very quickly myself.

Re:

[6Yankee (597075)]

I pirate Windows XP, and get FreeBSoD!

Re:

[bytesex (112972)]

I didn't mash my Windows key; that would be such a shame of this nice keyboard. Besides, I can't get any drill close enough to the surface without mashing other keys as well. And I'm not using it either. I have WindowMaker put everything I want behind a few function-keys.

Re:

[0100010001010011 (652467)]

So basically they reinvented Quicksilver but for Windows.

Re:More Raskins

[Constantine XVI (880691)]

Considering the popularity of Launchy (Win), Vista's start search, Quicksilver/Spotlight (Mac), Katapult (KDE) and GNOME Deskbar, I'd say he either hit a home run or knows trends when he sees them.

Personally, I feel very lost when I can't use any of those tools.

Re:More Raskins

[Evil Adrian (253301)]

Google Desktop does this too -- I actually realized that Launchy was totally redundant once I installed Google Desktop, so I removed it. Launchy is great, though.

Re:More Raskins

[xtracto (837672)]

Considering the popularity of Launchy (Win), Vista's start search, Quicksilver/Spotlight (Mac), Katapult (KDE) and GNOME Deskbar, I'd say he either hit a home run or knows trends when he sees them.

And this brings me to the question of, why aren't the menu and windows keys binded by default in many of the most popular linux distributions?, here I am writing this in Fedora 8 and neither the menu or any of the two windows keys of the keyobard do anything. The same thing happens in Ubuntu 7.10.

Now, I know there is a super-duper easy way to bind them in X/Y/Z menu or editing certain.conf file, but these keys are in almost every keyboard nowadays and they have specific functions (one open the sytem menu, the other opens the "alternative button" menu. And moreover, if they are binded by default and there is some keyboard that does not have them, it won't hurt the user in any way!

Re:

[Just Some Guy (3352)]

On Linux, - fi gets me Firefox.

That should've been <alt>-<space> fi <enter>.

Re:More Raskins

[Constantine XVI (880691)]

With Deskbar, after pressing alt-space, I could:
*launch a program out of the App menu
*launch a program from my PATH
*go to a web page
*start a mail to someone with their address or name
*launch a bookmark
*run a Tracker search
*look up something in the dictionary
*post to Twitter

And all of this is done in context, without having to drop a command before it.

Mayby they can send them to

[Respawner (607254)]

the Open Office project.
I always find myself lost when trying even basic stuff, could be I just suck at it ;-) but somehow I've always appreciated indesign more

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[emaname (1014225)]

...to the GIMP project. PLEASE send them to the GIMP project. I'm begging you.

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[eln (21727)]

It's not about making things pretty, it's about making things functional. In fact, I'd argue that too much effort has gone into making everything pretty and shiny and not enough on making things intuitive.

A UI designer should be concerned first and foremost with making things intuitive: putting the most common tasks in obvious places, making the program work the way people would expect it to work, that sort of thing. Then, they can send it off to the art department to make the buttons shiny if they want to.

I've often worked on projects where my job as a programmer (we didn't have "UI designers") was to make sure the program worked, flowed well, and performed tasks in an intuitive way. The designs were ugly as sin, but they worked. Then, we'd send the thing off to some graphic designer to make everything look pretty without changing the flow, button placement, etc.

Re:

[sm62704 (957197)]

I majored in Art and Design (late 1970s, before modern computers; the school's computer used punch cards), so I think I'm qualified to give you a hearty "hear hear!"

Either the people designing these days never studied design, or they've changed all the principles.

"Form follows function", or at least it did back in the stone age. BTW, speaking of design, the firehose is completely broken in IE 6, which I'm forced to use at work. It's so fun playing "catch the moving link!"

-mcgrew

Re:

[mjeffers (61490)]

When I'm working on a problem, I never think about Beauty, I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong. - Buckminster Fuller

This is one of my favorite quotes about design because it gets to the essential point (and the one you're making as well). Good design is about solving problems and truly good design is beautiful because, as any developer who's ever referred to a piece of code as "elegant" knows, there's a beauty in optimal solut

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[mwvdlee (775178)]

You'd be surprised by how easily people are confused by this.

Create a butt-ugly program where every feature is easy to find and compare it with a beautiful interface where every button is hidden behind layers of hoops. Most people will claim the beautiful one is more usable.

I've seen this while developing games; you can have all the gameplay finished and finetuned but not until the game has nice pictures instead of placeholders will they consider it "playable", even if you tell them you've yet to make it pretty.

This begs the question whether an open source project should be more concerned about looking usable or actually being usable. For commercial software, looks usually sell better than functionality. Sad but true. FOSS doesn't need to sell financially.

Re:

[DeadDecoy (877617)]

I would like to provide the counter-point that pretty interfaces are in fact, the other half of good UI design (the first being a good, intuitive workflow). A pretty interface provides the user with an easy-to-interperet map that should lessen the learning curve and improve initial acceptance rates. An intuitive design is allows the user to guess their way through a program and provides long term satisfaction in its usage. From a designers perspective the everything is intuitive and the user should be able

Re:

[mike_c999 (513531)]

An often misunderstood problem with Firefox is that it keeps a cache of pages you have visited in memory, thus causing very high memory usage.

type about:config in your address bar and change the value of browser.cache.memory.enable to false
this will dramatically reduce the memory usage in Firefox for those long browsing sessions but with a small hit to the speed of back/forwards functionality

good

[wwmedia (950346)]

firefox needs an UI facelift!

Re:good

[filbranden (1168407)]

firefox needs an UI facelift!

No it doesn't! More important than having a cool UI is adhering to current UI standards and doing things the way users expect them.

In most cases, great UI improvements are the incremental ones, not the revolutionary ones.

Firefox is already on the right track. Change it just for the sake of changing it would be bad.

Re:good

[slashbob22 (918040)]

In most cases, great UI improvements are the incremental ones, not the revolutionary ones.

It is a gamble. Office and ribbon are a good example. The trasition from the current way of doing things to ribbon can be time consuming, however when you have transitioned it is an improvement. Is it worth the pain? tbd.

Re:good

[filbranden (1168407)]

Office and ribbon are a good example.

Actually Office 2007 is one of my pet peeves. Incidentally, Microsoft nowadays seems to be breaking all UI standards just for the sake of the change. For instance, you can see several rants on Vista's new Windows Explorer [technotheory.com], IE7's lack of menu bar [greghughes.net], and Office's infamous ribbon [zdnet.com.au].

Funnily enough, sometime ago, the excuse not to adopt non-MS technology was that the interface doesn't follow Windows guidelines, it doesn't integrate with Windows as well as Microsoft applications (this was always a complaint with Lotus Notes on a company I worked for).

Now, Microsoft is making this problem irrelevant, since their own software doesn't follow Windows guidelines anymore. Heck, not even the different families of Windows apps are not consistent. If you see Office, IE, Messenger, WMP, it looks like each one of them was made by a completely different software vendor.

Re:

[MrSteveSD (801820)]

That's the problem with that kind of commercial software. You naturally reach a stage where nothing really needs changing much, but to keep making a profit you have to keep radically messing with it to make it look new and shiny so people will buy it. That's why FOSS makes so much more sense since it serves the needs of the users, not a large company's business needs.

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[mhall119 (1035984)]

I use small icons, and move the Bookmark Toolbar up to the menu bar, then hide the bookmarks toolbar. If you need more space you can hide the status bar. If you _still_ need more space, press F11 to go into fullscreen mode.

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[ceeam (39911)]

http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html#top [webstandards.org]

IE needs it more.

Re:

[canuck57 (662392)]

firefox needs an UI facelift!

If they do, keep that center button with tabs functionality. Addictive super addition to FireFox and I love that feature. IE users don't know what they are missing, unless of course M$ added it to IE7? Been so long since I used IE I don't know where they are at any more.

Ka-ching!

[by Anonymous Coward]

The lesson here is that to make progress sometimes you have to pay people.

I don't want innovative, give me easy, familiar ..

[petes_PoV (912422)]

... and intuitive any day.

It really hacks me off when someone changes a UI (or goods on supermarket shelves, for that matter) just for the sake of doing something new.

What we need are some standards here. Preferable just one, so people stick to it.

Re:I don't want innovative, give me easy, familiar

[hausrath (757099)]

But here's the thing... The statement they're making by doing this is that they think the interface they have isn't satisfactory - isn't intuitive enough. Hiring these people says that they recognize that improvements can be made in the UI which will make firefox more intuitive and easy to use. If that comes at the expense of some (quickly forgotten) sense of familiarity, so be it.

Re:I don't want innovative, give me easy, familiar

[Tribbin (565963)]

They get it; BLACK on WHITE; 500 - Internal Server Error

learning curves

[Arthur B. (806360)]

The Humanized website is an interesting read. While they do make valid points, they seem to fall into the "dummies" culture. Why does everything today has to be "for dummies" or in "24 hour"? What's wrong with learning curves? Learning curves exist for a reason... they're not here to make user's life miserable but simply because an interface that you learn can be more effective in the future. Of course, just because it's hard doesn't mean it's powerful. It is possible to build an unintuitive AND uneffective interface, but I think it is not always possible to be both intuitive and effective. On the humanized website, they seem to solely focus on the former : why is that? I think we are in fact facing a wide cultural problem of high time preference... before are not willing to spend a few minutes reading a manual or a few days getting use to a device, even if it can save them days later. For example, my mother works with computers all day and hunt and pecks at 20WPM. When I told her to spend some time learning to touchtype, she claim she didn't have time. Same story when I was in college, watching people spend hours writing formulas in word because it took too much time to learn LaTeX.

Back to interfaces. If what I describe is indeed a cultural phenomenom, then the guys at humanized are right, they are merely reflecting market demand for simplicity versus efficience, but this is in itself a sad thing. I think they do not emphasize the possibility of satisfying different kind of customers by providing optional advanced options.

Re:learning curves

[Unordained (262962)]

http://www.mit.edu/~jtidwell/language/sovereign_posture.html [mit.edu] from a collection of HCI design patterns at http://www.mit.edu/~jtidwell/interaction_patterns.html [mit.edu]; I think J. Tidwell has since moved on to http://designinginterfaces.com/Introduction [designinginterfaces.com] however, and in restructuring her thinking items like 'Sovereign Posture' seemed to lose their place. The new site seems to be more about layout than 'modes' or 'purposes' of use.

'Sovereign Posture' refers to the situation where an interface may be complex, and is designed for the 'expert user', but that's okay -- anyone using it already intends to become an expert and is willing to take the time needed to do so, so long as they know the reward will be a faster/more-expressive work environment. The idea is that sometimes it's not worth it to create a 'dummy' version of your software. It makes some sense for 'winzip', but not for 'word'.

Re:learning curves

[Krinsath (1048838)]

On the flip side of that coin, people who go through learning curves then become more resistant to an interface change (such as a new program, or an upgrade like Office 2007) due to the perceived time investment they put into the current one. "I spent six months learning how to get this one to work! I don't want to learn a new one!" is a fairly common human attitude. Using a basic, intuitive interface for basic tasks means that if you need to switch to another program with another basic interface you get less inertia with people to the change and less "shift downtime" while people adjust.

From a business perspective, such things are highly desirable as you can keep technology up to date while not negatively impacting worker productivity with having to learn something that isn't really their job. They hired an accountant to do accounting, not work an email program and every minute/hour/day/month he has to spend learning a new interface is money that's been lost from the reason he's there. Accounting is his job, not email...even if email is tightly integrated into the communications about his job it's not their primary function. So from an efficiency standpoint you'd want a simpler interface that can be learned quickly and easily.

Now, for more advanced work (such as the financial system that accountant would use as part of their core job) there's a strong case that a learning curve and it's boosts to productivity on complex tasks outweighs possible issues with later changes, but I can't think of a product that Mozilla makes that I'd put into the "advanced work" category. They seem to make apps for fairly basic tasks.

So basically (horrid pun intended), when the work is what people get hired to do, the interface should be powerful at the cost of simplicity. When it's an incidental task that will be performed in the execution of their main job, I'd say a simpler interface should simple, even if not as powerful, at least by default.

Re:

[sm62704 (957197)]

What's wrong with learning curves?

What's wrong with having a needle stuck in your ass? Yes, sometimes the doctor needs to give you a shot of something or other but if he gives you the choice between an oral antibiotic and a big needle in the ass, which are you going to choose?

If you have two things that perform the same functions, and one has a steep learning curve and the other doesn't, the one without a learning curve is the best one. Just like a pill beats a shot any day.

Yes, like a needle in the ass, so

Uh oh, Opera here I come

[sm62704 (957197)]

This doesn't look good AT ALL.

"small software company that is known for its considerable usability expertise and innovative user interface design. The Humanized developers will be working at Mozilla Labs on Firefox and innovative new projects."

I hope I'm wrong, but "innovative" and "user interface" in the same sentence are sometimes good, but rarely. I'm thinking of innovations like Microsoft's not showing all menu items, or web 2.0 innovations that move the fucking link when you try to click (ala the firehose, please redesign that travesty, I have to use IE at work!)

OTOH there are good UI innovations, like the circular menu that nobody's used. Fingers crossed, at least they have no monopoly and if Firefox starts sucking I can go elsewhere.

-mcgrew

The problem wiht usability experts

[serviscope_minor (664417)]

The problem wiht usability experts is that they would never come up with vi. That's because it's complex, hard to learn and impossible for beginners to quit (never mind learn) without a cheat sheet. But get past that (and some of us do) and there is an incredibly powerful editor which becomes easier and easier to use as one learns. Many of us vi fanatics find everything else hard to use by comparison.

But because of that a UI expert would never come up with it. Is this a big problem? I dunno.

Re:

[BlueBoxSW.com (745855)]

Powerful and easy to learn do not have to be mutually exclusive.

Re:

[ricebowl (999467)]

The problem wiht(sic) usability experts is that they would never come up with vi. That's because it's complex, hard to learn and impossible for beginners to quit (never mind learn) without a cheat sheet.

I agree that a UI expert isn't going to come up with Vi in its current format, but I think you're equating a complex interface with a complex/powerful program. Ideally what would happen is that the programmer comes up with Vi then passes it to a UI expert who then passes it to an art department.

The fact th

Re:The problem wiht usability experts

[kellyb9 (954229)]

You're missing the point altogether behind usability. An interface should be intuitive such that someone who has never worked with a computer in their life can walk up and understand what they're doing after a limited amount of time. Vi may be powerful, and I'm sure you'll get modded up on a place like Slashdot for mentioning it. But when I walk up to a terminal using it, what do I do? what are the conventions in place? How does it relate to anything in the real world? Bottom line is that it doesn't meet any of the criteria behind usability. As much as it pains me to say this, Microsoft Word is more powerful than Vi in terms of usability. You push a letter and it shows up on the screen.

Simplicity.

[edgarhz (732153)]

From the article: His design philosophy extends from the belief that the best kind of interface is no interface at all.

From the site [humanized.com]: 500 - Internal Server Error

Nice proposal.

New company name

[SolitaryMan (538416)]

The should rename their company to "Slashdotted"

Firefox doesn't need a team of UI engineers....

[moosesocks (264553)]

When they're done with Firefox, could they spare a few guys to work on OpenOffice, The GIMP, and Blender? Those projects seem more in the need of a UI overhaul than Firefox does.

(But still, I'm excited to see that some of the "big" open-source projects are taking UI design seriously. Huzzah!)

Re:

[Bob54321 (911744)]

What is worse is that I can't even use their site. The pages are just taking so long to load... Hang on. It is worth the load times just to see their haircuts. And Mozilla is getting these guys to do UI!

Re:UI Experts???

[gEvil (beta) (945888)]

No, they put the SITE MAP at the bottom of each page. The main nav is the navbar at the top of the page. Would you be making the same complaint if they had just made the site map a separate page like most sites do?

Re:

[Foofoobar (318279)]

Yes and it's a known fact that you don't dictate to the usr how they need to navigate; you have functional redundancy and easy to find nav.. including easy to find SITEMAP. I would have never looked here and found it by pure chance when looking all over for contact info. They guys are horrible.

Somple nav is one thing. Thats an obvious feature. Bt forcing ONE way to navigate, your way, isn't necessarily the best way. Users often want other ways to navigate, to link ideas and concepts. Rather than going to

Re:

[ricebowl (999467)]

Quite a bit of it comes from Google [internetnews.com] every time you use the integrated Google search bar.

Re:

[aesiamun (862627)]

That's an awesome site!

500 - Internal Server Error

Re:

[SharpFang (651121)]

Amen.

I'm proficient in GIMP and don't know photoshop. I even like GIMP. I use it often. And I still think its UI is horrible.