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.""

UI Experts???

[Foofoobar]

How are these guys UI experts? They made the Universal flaw of placing their entire nav at the bottom of their site rather than breaking it up. You have to scroll to the bottom of the page each time you want to see the entire NAV!!! How is that an EXPERT decision? Imagine if Firefox were designed that way?

Re:More Raskins

[wampus]

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

Re:More Raskins

[Evil Adrian]

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]

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:Firefox is fine...

[SharpFang]

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.

Re:good

[Kram_Gunderson]

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.

Exactly. One of the (several) reasons I can't stand using Internet Explorer 7 is the 'new and improved' UI that puts the stop and refresh buttons on the right side of the address bar. I'm not sure what drove that decision, but I am continually mousing over to the left side of the address bar (where they are on every other browser). I wish I could just not use it, but unfortunately web design/development requires testing in IE7, and a lot of page refreshes as things are tweaked.

Re:good

[filbranden]

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:Mayby they can send them to

[mwvdlee]

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:Where does Mozilla get its money?

[b96miata]

Speaking of google, firefox, and the search bar, it actually makes the calculator example they beat you over the head with in the enso video somewhat moot. All I do when I want to calculate something is start typing it in the search box, and the "suggestion" that comes up is the google calculator result. It's a hell of a lot more functional than just a four function calc with the way it handles units, too. Plenty of times I've typed something like "9GB / 1500KB/s" to see how long a download will take, or maybe "9GB/ 1.5hr in Mbps" to see how much streaming something over a wireless net is going to be pushing it on bandwidth.