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.""

Re:Where does Mozilla get its money?

[ricebowl]

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

Re:learning curves

[Unordained]

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]

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:Mayby they can send them to

[mike_c999]

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

Re:More Raskins

[Just Some Guy]

On Linux, - fi gets me Firefox.

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

Re:More Raskins

[leamanc]

No need to open a terminal. Alt+F2 to open the "Run Command" window and you can then use tab completion to your heart's content.

Re:More Raskins

[Constantine XVI]

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.