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.""

Comments

More Raskins

[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]

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]

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

Re:More Raskins

[ByOhTek]

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

Re:More Raskins

[0100010001010011]

So basically they reinvented Quicksilver but for Windows.

Re:More Raskins

[Constantine XVI]

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

[bytesex]

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: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

[Constantine XVI]

Good call there. Someone give this man a mod point.

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:More Raskins

[marafa]

mmm.. mind if i follow your corollary?
george w bush is george bush's son. the kid has been living and breathing presidential quality his entire life. looks like the people of america picked a good one.

Re:More Raskins

[Constantine XVI]

Well, in GNOME, the menu key serves the same function as in Windows (r-click menu), but the Super/Win key seems to be set up as a modifier key by default. It sounds like you can't use modifier keys by themselves, so you can't have Super-Tab (WindowFlow switching) and Super pulling up the app menu at the same time, you have to choose.

PS: Since I never actually use the Menu key for menus, i disabled it, and remapped it to Scale and Expo (Alt-Menu).

Re:More Raskins

[Hatta]

How are these any better than popping open a terminal and using tab-completion?

Re:More Raskins

[Just Some Guy]

How are these any better than popping open a terminal and using tab-completion?

None of them involve opening a terminal, for starters. On Linux, - fi gets me Firefox. Could I really do that more easily in a shell?

Re:More Raskins

[cuantar]

My question exactly. The "fancy" method seems fundamentally limited, as it probably requires the user to define aliases for things and remember those. I get instant feedback from my shell, on the other hand, and I have access to everything in my PATH. If the fancy method just searches the PATH, how is it different than pressing Alt+F2 and using the Run... dialog?

Re:More Raskins

[Just Some Guy]

On Linux, - fi gets me Firefox.

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

Re:More Raskins

[Just Some Guy]

It's really one of those things you have to experience before you can understand it. Try the popular launcher on your OS of choice for a few days. If you don't like it, no harm done. If you do like it, hey! New shininess.

Re:More Raskins

[Hatta]

Sure, just bind RXVT to alt-space. Or just use yakuake or the like and you don't even need the hot keys. Or just use the terminal you have open anyway.

Re:More Raskins

[Just Some Guy]

Sure, just bind RXVT to alt-space.

...making the minimal set of keystrokes is <alt>-<space> fi <tab> & <enter> <control>-d and involves spawning a new zsh process with the startup overhead that entails. It also makes me have to manually close the terminal window afterward (possibly much later if Firefox opens before I manage to hit ^D to exit the shell, which also means that Firefox swallows the ^D and prompts me for the folder I'd like to put my newly-requested bookmark in).

No, I have to say that's not any easier.

Re:More Raskins

[Hatta]

I've tried katapult, it's absolutely awful. I can see using it if firefox is the only thing you ever want to launch, but then why not just put an icon on your toolbar. It pretty much always guesses wrong, and unlike tab completion doesn't show me all the possible alternatives, just a couple. And if I make a mistake and try to backspace... well I'm not sure just what it's doing there. Tab completion works in a predictable way, with katapult I never know what I'm going to get.

Re:More Raskins

[HeroreV]

it probably requires the user to define aliases for things

Katapult doesn't and I really don't think the others do either.

I get instant feedback from my shell

With Katapult, get a big icon of the thing you're currently targeting and the rest of the name shown automatically. It gets updated after every keystroke. You never have to hope you've entered enough and press tab, only to have to enter more. With Katapult, just you start typing the name of the program (or document or whatever) and you know as soon as you've typed enough. After you hit enter, Katapult automatically closes, unlike the command line which you have to close down separately.

If the fancy method just searches the PATH

Katapult can search Amarok, your home folder, and a myriad of other things. I'm pretty sure other launchers can do such stuff too.

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

[Hatta]

Why bother closing the terminal? You're just going to need another one next time you want to launch an app or use cp, ls, vi, grep, etc.

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.

Re:More Raskins

[firewrought]

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.

I think a better example would be Raskin's suggestion that users of a system be assigned unique passwords so they can login without having to type their username. It simplifies the login a little bit, but any usability gains are lost when the user cannot set their own password. Raskin seems to overvalue the flow of a user's experience, but I guess he's worth reading some since most programmers undervalue that flow.

Re:More Raskins

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy's daddy invented that feature when he wrote a text editor for Hannibal Lecter. I'm glad Firefox's inline search doesn't involve holding down anything - yet.

Re:More Raskins

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI, in KDE you don't have to "edit certain .conf file"... you just go to "keyboard layout" in system settings and select a layout that includes the windows key.

This works for me in Kubuntu and I assume it works fine in KDE in all distros.

Re:More Raskins

[xtracto]

Hey, you forgot to read the following part of my comment:
Now, I know there is a super-duper easy way to bind them in X/Y/Z menu or ...
  it is just before the "certain .conf file" part.

Either, it is that Linux does not recognize my keyboard properly or that KDE failed to bind the keys. However, it happens with all keyboards i have tested so far ..

Re:More Raskins

[6Yankee]

I pirate Windows XP, and get FreeBSoD!

Re:More Raskins

[defaria]

Now all we need is somebody to design real names! I mean "ta bu shi da yu"?!? You've gots to be kidding!

Re:More Raskins

[Ben174]

In XP: Win+R, type 'firefox', hit enter.

Re:More Raskins

[hyperizer]

I think you're forgetting one of the first--LaunchBar for NeXT from 1995, which is now an OS X app.

Re:More Raskins

[Anonymous Coward]

No! Don't tell them!

I prefer minimal key-bindings by default. Quite a few users I know do too. This is because it's a royal pain to go through the list unbinding every arcane possible key combo from every ridiculously obscure function, and then rebinding them to the functions you actually want. The Windows key is the one I can count on for *mine*, to bind myself.

Unless I'm using KDE. They've been binding the Windows keys for years; where have you been? It would help if KDE at least went with convention - but they break their back to make sure that as many keys as humanly possible do something different from their normal function on every other system!

Re:More Raskins

[jo42]

Under the smaller and faster XP, I press Windows, f, Enter.

Yours is another example of how Microsoft buggered the UI in Vista.

Re:More Raskins

[cheeseboy001]

Actually, a lot of the stuff under "Our Philosophy" on "About Us" is slightly paraphrased from "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman.

Re:More Raskins

[wampus]

Yep, a 3d cartoon dog is much lighter and more useful than a bare textbox. I agree 1000%

Re:More Raskins

[Daniel Phillips]

Well here's hoping he can fix the horrid file open, save and print dialogs.

Re:More Raskins

[amRadioHed]

Ta bu shi da yu He's not an old fish?

Re:More Raskins

[Fred_A]

In Vista I mash the Windows key and type firefox. Huh ? You *mash* keys ?? Is your nick Hawkeye or Radar or something ?

Re:More Raskins

[EdgeOfEpsilon]

>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. "A designer knows he has reached perfection, not when there is nothing to add, but when there is nothing to take away." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery In this case, anything more would be too much.

Mayby they can send them to

[Respawner]

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

[Respawner]

d'oh, before people bash me, I meant after they're done with their work at mozilla, I think it's an excellent move and more projects should be able to get UI designers. Because let's face it, most of us programmers don't know how to make stuff pretty :)

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[eln]

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:Mayby they can send them to

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I think Mozilla would be much better off finding someone to plug the memory leaks and other stability problems. The latest version stops working after a few days and I have to kill it and restart. The only reason I stick with FF right now is the plugins.

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[sm62704]

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:Mayby they can send them to

[emaname]

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

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:Mayby they can send them to

[mjeffers]

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 solutions.

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[kellyb9]

Yeah, but good UI design helps us hide the things that aren't functional :-)

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:Mayby they can send them to

[jd142]

This is true, except that what is optimal for me may not be optimal for you. Humans are too squishy -- we have habits that we've picked up over the years, physical differences, skill differences, etc.

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[Jeff DeMaagd]

If it's not really a leak, then I don't have a problem with it taking memory, as long as it's being useful.

It still doesn't resolve the stability problem. Seriously, I can use Firefox for maybe three days before it must be restarted because it starts acting like there's no server on the other end. Kill it and restart the session and it's fine. I've even gone to FF 1.5 and I'm running almost no extensions except the two that I must have.

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd be surprised by how easily people are confused by this.
This begs the question...

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[The Queen]

It's not about making things pretty, it's about making things functional.

Agreed. I am a graphics designer by trade, so it's my job to make things pretty, but I am working on a windoze machine and prefer to set all my displays to 'windows classic' folders because the newer, 'pretty' XP window designs bother me. They feel bloaty and less functional. I don't want giant icons all over the place, and I don't want my fonts aliased and blurred out, thankyouverymuch. Some days I am glad I don't work on a Mac, even if it is better for graphics. (Hang on, someone's come to revoke my graphics geek license...)

That said, the Adobe CS3 package UI upgrades aren't as bad as I thought they'd be; however, the move towards icon-based workspaces is troubling. First, the cash register at McDonald's; tomorrow, Photoshop...

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[danpsmith]

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.

Most definitely. I've noticed that when I'm prototyping something out and throwing it together it garners no attention whatsoever. You put some actual stock images on or something and suddenly it's a big hit, even if it works exactly the same as it did a week ago. People are very form over function oriented in general, and most people in charge don't even think about the function until the graphics are all in place, then it's "can we move this here, can we move that there" when that would've been better done in the design phase. Personally, I always prefer tools that work over ones that look pretty, but I'm in the minority.

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[gaforces]

I was thinking exactly that about Windows Media Center, it's shiny and plays pretty good, but options are nested behind 10 buttons. And even then options are lacking cause its Vista ...
You would expect more media hardware options and capability's, but you don't get them. It's dumbed down and those options are are hidden/disabled because of compatibility development issues.

I rather like the less attractive UI with all the capability's of my hardware presented, tweakable, and functional.

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[DeadDecoy]

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 meander their way through in a matter of minutes. From a user perspective they need to complete a project under some deadline and have the application to do X, Y, and Z in one button push (even if such a button isn't practical). Therefore, the user needs to be able to learn AND use a robust program with relative ease. If users don't learn a complex tool easily enough, lazy or not, then they'll never use it. This makes UI design hard for complex systems/workflows.

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[dprovine]

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.

This happens in many fields. In education it's known as the Dr. Fox Effect, after a study in which a "Doctor Fox" gave an expressive and interesting lecture and was rated higher than another professor who gave a less entertaining lecture with more content.

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[The_Wilschon]

Have you considered trying firefox 2, in which many problems from firefox 1.5 have been fixed (as they should be)? If you have problems, oftentimes, getting the latest version is more productive than complaining about them. Problems certainly aren't going to get fixed in old, deprecated versions. I don't know if your particular problem is fixed in firefox 2, but it is much more likely to be fixed there than in firefox 1.5.

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[Anonymous Coward]

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. Donald Norman's Emotional Design book talks about this.. Pretty interfaces make people's minds more relaxed and able to find alternative solutions when they encounter problems.

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I *was* using FF2.0 and downgraded to 1.5. Over the 2.0.0.x updates, it seems like FF2.0 was getting worse than 1.5 ever was.

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[Gilmoure]

I went to school for industrial design because I hated the '85 Camaro Berlineta dashboard layout. Not only was it visually confusing, it was physically painful, with sharp edges projecting out to gouge knees.

After a couple years, I dropped out, when I realized the teachers there were teaching 'teh shiny' over useful design.

your Baby's First Spoon is innovative and useful, but you need to make it sexy! Make it look like it should be on Star Trek. (Next Gen at the time) I went and sculpted a woman's nude torso into the handle. Design teacher was not amused but fine arts sculpture prof liked it. I left after that.

What a lot of designers and engineers fail to realize is that, just because something works for them, that does not mean it will work for a majority of users. There seems to be a certain egotism in some folk: if it's good for them, it should be good for everyone. It's like they want their perception of the world to be paramount, even while they celebrate their iconoclastic tastes as a geek. WTF?!!!

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[Khalid]

This also true for website design, through in beautiful pictures and shiny colors and people will be happy.

I also remember that at the University, students with "graphic oriented" projects, were systematically getting better grades than those that don't. I remember how I have spent days and days finding the latest and more optimised Fast Fourrier Transform algorithm, searching for the lastest published litterature and all and optimising every little detail, but didn't got a grade I considered fair just because I had no fancy graphics to show; while other stupid cellular automata drawing projects got excellents grades, just because they looked pretty, and spectacular.

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[RabidOverYou]

If you chose your education from the flaws of an '85 Camaro, my gosh you'd be in school for forty years.

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[PitaBred]

You didn't find a very good University, then. I had only instructors that would fail people unless things were right, no matter how pretty they were. Except in Graphics, but that's to be expected, and even then he wanted people to do the right thing first, and make it really pretty second.

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[z-man]

Actually hidings choices/features can be a smart thing to do sometimes. Although not directly about GUI design, http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6127548813950043200 is an extremely interesting video about the paradox of choice.

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[sm62704]

What a lot of designers and engineers fail to realize is that, just because something works for them, that does not mean it will work for a majority of users.

There's one fairly recent innovation in design that is way overdue - useability testing.

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[Gilmoure]

A lot of times, software designers will try their stuff out with other tech minded folk. After doing tech support for 15 years, I've realized that tech types have a different way of approaching problems, that seems to involve a little more experimentation than non-tech types. Was really impressed here at my work, where the ticket software team decided to test their stuff not just with the tech support folks who will be using the software but also with office admins and such. One major thing the admins caught was that all the text list fields did not default sort the same way. While a small thing, once it was fixed, tech users reported things seemed 'smoother'.

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[Gilmoure]

You don't want to hear the tale of trying to replace the factory stereo-on-a-stick once it burnt out. If iPods had been around 10 years earlier, wouldn't have been such a big deal but back then, transitioning to cd players, it sucked. Devolved to a diskman outputting to an amp in the hatch, all secured with velcro. Pretty ugly.

But yeah, after having older cars (MGA, 69 Camaro, etc.) and finally getting a new-ish car (bought used, cheap, 'cause original owner didn't want to take it in to shop one more time), I was appalled at how stupid some of the visual design cues were in the dashboard. Looked like it was designed by some guy who'd worked on Logan's Run or Space 1999.

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but if we're going in order of who needs them the worst, the Blender team will have their undivided attention until about 2027.

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[Enselic]

The GIMP developers are fully aware of the shortcomings of GIMP, and the plan for the UI is pretty clear. The bottleneck is lack of developer resources. Putting the Mozilla UI people on GIMP team would not make the "delivery" of GIMP with an awesome UI happen faster. (Unless these UI people also would contribute a considerable amount of code.)

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[Zarniwoot]

GIMP already has their own UI redesign team.

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[Lunzo]

Why do you need to have firefox open for 3 days at a time anyway? I'm not surprised the programmers haven't tested for your particular case, as it doesn't seem like a typical use.

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[LifesABeach]

Maybe before the new hires begin their respective projects, could they create a simplified table of functionalities with respect to KDE,Gnome,Windoze,OSX? From my experience, those things one can do have been fairly well handled by all four. It would be grimly ironic to "openly" discover that other than location, there is no difference in desk top managers.

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[Kalriath]

Nope. OpenOffice.org really needs it. The front UI is pretty OK, easily recognisable (and after the initial sloooooooow loading, quite responsive) but just open a dialog... I dare you... the Options dialog is so difficult to navigate for one used to any other word processor, some features are near impossible to find (such as Default Font), and the failure to utilise common dialogs in places where they should be used detracts also.

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[hendridm]

I'll admit I'm a freak, but I've had FF instances open for *weeks*. Often times, it's due to me finding something interesting/useful (usually code) that I want to research/play with, but I don't want to do it right now. So I leave the instance open until I feel like addressing it.

I find that if I bookmark it, it disappears into the oblivion that is my endless bookmark list, so I prefer to leave the instance open (forcing me to remember to deal with it).

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty interfaces make people's minds more relaxed and able to find alternative solutions when they encounter problems.

Oh, dear, I didn't mean it like that. I just meant you look better without the dress.

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[IdeaMan]

The reason I leave it open for weeks at a time is I like to keep my context, and I haven't found a way to close firefox so that when it reloads it has all the same tabs open. If I shut the computer down it does the right thing (save the tabs), but when I hit X I lose them all and it restarts at my homepage.

As an aside, we CS people have missed the boat on computing in general. Computer interfaces should be persistent. If I yank the power cord out from the wall then plug it back in, one measure of how fast the computer is would be how long it takes to have all the same windows open with all the same data. By this metric performance on modern machines is worse than atrocious, I mean sometimes it doesn't even save your work!?! And no I don't mean auto-save, overwriting what's on disk. Microsoft Word has this partially implemented, where it will save a copy of what you were editing to a temporary file.

Re:Mayby they can send them to

[hendridm]

If I shut the computer down it does the right thing (save the tabs), but when I hit X I lose them all and it restarts at my homepage.

Ok, this is a lousy workaround, but for Windows, I've found if you end the firefox task in Task Manager, it saves your tabs for the next time you open. ;)

Smart move

[Anonymous Coward]

Although Firefox/thunderbird aren't the worst offenders of UI hell, this is a pretty good plan.
Let the devs of mozilla stick with good/safe/functional software, and let 'specialists' take care of the UI.

good

[wwmedia]

firefox needs an UI facelift!

Re:good

[filbranden]

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

[ceeam]

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

IE needs it more.

Re:good

[slashbob22]

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

[canuck57]

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.

Re:good

[sm62704]

There's good reason to change its Linux interface. On my small monitor there's not much of the Firefox screen that's devoted to the page being viewed.

I still like it better than konqueror though.

Re:good

[EgoWumpus]

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.

Doing things the way the user expects is good UI. But finding the 'intuitive' interface is not always as straightforward as it seems - and often isn't the 'orderly' layout.

Re:good

[Anonymous Coward]

What Firefox needs most is the ability to select multiple stories from their RSS feed live bookmark dropdowns, say with ctrl-click while the drop-down stays in place, then open them all at once in different tabs. You know, just like ctrl-click selects additional files in Windows Explorer without opening them. Perhaps this can be these guys' first assignment. Right now it's left-click the RSS feed drop-down, middle-click for new tab, left-click drop-down, middle-click for new tab, over and over. Or is there a way to do this I'm unaware of? (And I don't mean middle-click on the live bookmark to open all zillion stories at once, only the few that I want to see.)

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

[Bert64]

However, firefox is themeable... Hopefully whatever new UI they come up with can be replaced with the standard theme if the new one is too horrendous...

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, IE7's lack of menu bar, and Office's infamous ribbon.

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:good

[barzok]

Now, Microsoft is making this problem irrelevant, since their own software doesn't follow Windows guidelines anymore

MS has been doing this for years. Either Office 95 or Office 97 (and later versions) skipped the standard file dialog boxes (open, save, etc.) and implemented its own version of it.

Re:good

[Hatta]

There are definitely things firefox could do to improve its UI. Case in point: detachable/attachable tabs. Another: that horrid thing they call a file dialog.

Re:good

[Oligonicella]

"...however when you have transitioned it is an improvement."

Uh, no. That's an opinion only, not a statement of fact.

Re:good

[RemoteSojourner]

I would have thought most Design/Development people would use F5 and Esc for Refresh and stop.

Re:good

[mhall119]

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). Of all of the many many (many) things wrong with Lotus Notes, they complain about that?

Re:good

[mhall119]

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.

Re:good

[freemywrld]

And/or FF with IE tab installed. That was a lifesaver when I was working web design.

Re:good

[Khelder]

A constant tension in "improving" the UI of an existing program is that the users say, "Make it better. But don't change anything."

This is sensible on their part, but makes life hard for UI designers. Up to a point, incremental improvements can do a lot for a lot of the UIs out there. (In fact, for most software out there, commercial and OSS, incremental work would go a *long* way toward improving usability.)

However, some improvements cannot be done incrementally. To pick an extreme example, textual, keyboard-based interfaces could never be incrementally improved to have a mouse-oriented UI.

Re:good

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you need even more space, try the fullerscreen firefox plugin, it hides the status and menu bars, similiar to the autohide settings on many window managers gnome/windows/etc.

Re:good

[Burz]

And what are the chances these UI generalists will break very specific and important browser semantics?

I'd say its very high, unfortunately. Apple is a UI design powerhouse, and they loused-up Safari by making status bar invisible by default (teaches people not to took at the URLs before clicking on them) and changed the SSL warning dialogs to flow in a way that doesn't seem secure.

And don't think this move isn't about Mozilla copying Apple; It probably is. Apple have added some nice things in the way of touchscreen / trackpad gestures. Unfortunately Mozilla could end up copying their dangerous features as well.

Another example of broken browsers is the one that comes with the OLPC XO. There is no Address Bar, and of course icons cannot uniquely distinguish web sites (since images are easily copied). Its scary that we have prominent FOSS projects and major corporations promoting this level of brokenness, encouraging users to rely on how a website's graphics look for identification even more than they are doing already.

Re:good

[MrSteveSD]

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.

Re:good

[Anonymous Coward]

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

If internal is the opposite of external, what's the opposite of incremental?

Re:good

[sm62704]

I usually do use fullscreen mode.

Re:good

[doktor-hladnjak]

I have no comment on IE or Windows explorer, but the Office 2007 UI was not changed just for the sake of change. It was changed because feature rich applications like Word, Excel and PowerPoint had already passed the practical limits of a menu/toolbar and dialog based UI. Users had to dig through long, often confusing menus to find an entry point to an often complicated dialog. Many users were faced with an overload of options and simply gave up searching. A main goal of the Office UI overhaul was to improve discoverability (resulting in the ribbon) and to make it easier to format documents nicely (resulting in galleries). This presentation by Jensen Harris pretty much sums up the reasoning behind the UI change.

And the reason it seems like Office, Messenger and WMP are made by completely different software vendors is because basically they are. Microsoft does not have some monolithic development staff that rotates around from project to project ensuring consistency. It's a very large company with many different groups of people working on specific products.

Re:good

[Anonymous Coward]

You should probably just expect more stuff like that file dialog. It is, after all, a product of the UI expert people at Gnome.

Re:good

[Blakey Rat]

You know Microsoft actually does usability testing, both in a lab and in normal day-to-day usage, right? I'm a lot more likely to trust a UI decision made by Microsoft after testing than I am one made by some random open source project which has never tested at all.

In any case, the Office 2007 ribbon is an improvement in almost every way. The complaint you linked to is extremely petty (basically some people complained it took too much of the screen, so MS added a minimizing function to it) and says nothing about its general usability over the old menus-and-dialogs.

Now, Microsoft is making this problem irrelevant, since their own software doesn't follow Windows guidelines anymore.

True, but Office never particularly followed them that closely anyway.

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.

Also true. And the Live Messenger and WMP people did a shitty job, IMO.

But Microsoft does treat them as entirely different divisions who are free to write software the way they like. You'd think a Slashdotter would see that as a good thing, not a bad thing.

And the stark reality is, while the Windows team does come up with a lot of UI guidelines, the Windows team doesn't really build any applications... Office encounters problems that the Windows team would never see, simply because of the inherent differences between a word processor and a file browser.

Re:good

[Psych0_Jack]

Yay! Glad to hear I'm not the only one that does this. Although I usually leave the status bar visible.

Re:good

[zsau]

Firefox is way off base. Its UI needs to adhere to current UI standards and do things the way users expect them. Unfortunately, it only gets close on Windows (although that's a problem I have little experience with). On other platforms there's a little bit of token integration by moving things like the "Edit Preferences" dialog around to different places, but the advanced features which attract a user to a platform are completely uncatered for. It's ugly, again making a token integration by adopting some aspects of the current theme, but not others, and in fact inventing novel and ugly poorly themed aspects like the way it shows framse in its option dialog box.

I do not use Firefox, and I don't recommend it to anyone. I only reluctantly use Gecko-based browsers (because most of the usability problems with Firefox are also in Gecko). If they fixed these problems, so that it integrated so well into the platform I was unable to tell it was a cross-platform program, I might be happy. But I think before that happens ports for Apple's WebKit will be stable. WebKit tries to integrate into the platform — and generally succeeds, even down the level of the programming language API — and will slowly eat away at Firefox's market share until Mozilla realises they have a problem.

Re:good

[oliderid]

I use vista for one month

Concerning vista Windows explorer, I prefer it over XP windows explorer anyday.
For example you just type in the address bar: ftp://yourserver.com and it opens a ftp session just like Konqueror.

Re:good

[Kalriath]

I know exactly what we're missing - nothing. Middle clicking is an integral part of tabbed browsing, and it was added to stay consistent with Opera and Firefox.

Ka-ching!

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Ka-ching!

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. A problem with the FOSS movement is you have a whole bunch of unqualified people doing things they have no clue about (user interface, etc) simply because they're willing to do it for free.

Occasionally you've gotta bring in the experts.

Re:Ka-ching!

[Anonymous Coward]

...with the unibrow/mutton-chop combo or an awkwardly-popped collar.

Re:Ka-ching!

[Isauq]

Isn't that what Open Usability is about? Additionally, considering the number of exceedingly terrible websites I've seen by so-called "Usability Experts," how can you really define what it means to be "qualified?"

User Interface of the Day

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out heir User Interface of the Day blog entries:
http://www.humanized.com/weblog/

Re:User Interface of the Day

[aesiamun]

That's an awesome site!

500 - Internal Server Error

Re:User Interface of the Day

[ortzinator]

http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:2XfYwvrr1vMJ:www.humanized.com/

What is wrong with the FF UI?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is wrong with the FF UI. Its clean, not cluttered and readable. Its soooooo much better than Microsofts IE. (This is coming from someone that prefers MS to Linux/apple)

Re:What is wrong with the FF UI?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is wrong with the FF UI. Its clean, not cluttered and readable. Its soooooo much better than Microsofts IE. (This is coming from someone that prefers MS to Linux/apple) My largest complaint about Firefox is that it looks and feels out of place on every platform. I use Linux (Ubuntu/CentOS), Mac OS X (Leopard), and Windows (XP/Vista) daily and it sticks out badly on all of them. It irritates me to no end when using Gnome and OS X.

Re:What is wrong with the FF UI?

[aerthling]

You'll appreciate Firefox 3 when it's released then, because it now integrates with the UI on each platform, and it does it pretty darn well as far as I'm concerned. I'm using 3b3pre under GNOME and it even uses the icons from the current theme. It's pretty schmick.

Re:What is wrong with the FF UI?

[metamatic]

Well, I think the UI for controlling scripting and cookies could use some serious work, see sig.

Re:What is wrong with the FF UI?

[cromar]

Ew. The main browser window looks so bad on OS X :( I can't say I'm a huge fan of brushed aluminum anywhere but iTunes (and similar list-operation programs). I do like the HUD and cover flow stuff, though. You know, as long as it doesn't kill performance...

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

[petes_PoV]

... 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.

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:UI Experts???

[Bob54321]

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???

[Anonymous Coward]

And you can't even open the Title-links in tabs on their page as they are embedded objects.

Re:UI Experts???

[gEvil (beta)]

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:UI Experts???

[Anonymous Coward]

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? Hey, it's so good we won't be able to understand it for a few more years;-)

Who would have thought to use "500 - Internal Server Error" as a theme?

Re:UI Experts???

[Anonymous Coward]

If it makes you feel better they've been /.ed

Re:UI Experts???

[Foofoobar]

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 an 'edit page' to access editing functions, they may want to first access a 'view page' and then access edit functions from there. Several ways to navigate to the same place... not one. And all intuitive and easy to find.

Re:UI Experts???

[Dancindan84]

Is there a contact page where you could ask them for more question marks and caps so it would be more intuitive for you?

Re:UI Experts???

[Anonymous Coward]

You wouldn't have thought to look at the "About" page to find contact info? You're just bitching to hear yourself bitch. Grow up.

Re:UI Experts???

[Anonymous Coward]

Your example got pwnt so now just disappear until the next article like any rational troll.

Re:UI Experts???

[Foofoobar]

Heh... someone from Humanize got their feelings hurt. Next time learn to design an interface

Re:UI Experts???

[CastrTroy]

Reminds me of Web Vastu

Go, go

[Suicidal Gir]

Gadgetmobile!

Just try to think of something else when looking at those screenshots.

learning curves

[Arthur B.]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Dude! I think your mom is a dude.

Bummer.

Re:learning curves

[Unordained]

http://www.mit.edu/~jtidwell/language/sovereign_posture.html from a collection of HCI design patterns at http://www.mit.edu/~jtidwell/interaction_patterns.html; I think J. Tidwell has since moved on to http://designinginterfaces.com/Introduction 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:learning curves

[sm62704]

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, sometmes a steep learning curve is necessary. But it should never be wanted. Even if your tool is complex, if your IU has a steep learning curve you've failed at designing the UI.

Re:learning curves

[mjeffers]

You usually want to reserve designs that require a learning curve for situations where you can be sure that clear and consistent training will be required or at least easily available for those that need it. No one designs in-flight control systems for dummies because pilots are required/want (out of a fear of crashing and dieing) to be trained on how to use the system. Similarly, if you find Photoshop too challenging but think you can make money with it you can buy a book or take a training course.

No one makes money from learning how to use their browser better and they don't really gain an advantage that's meaningful for them by learning to touch-type rather than hunt and peck if all they do is type emails to friends/family. The reality is that none of these things are important enough for people to feel like investing in becoming experts nor should they be. As a designer, you need to think about how your app fits into the context of someone's life. For things where people are unlikely to invest you need to design for experiences that can be easily and quickly (intuitive's a dangerous word) understood. If you design an expert interface for those scenarios your users will just go to a competitor product who designs to better fit into their life.

While you are somewhat right that this minimizes expert users those users either don't exist in sufficient numbers to be worth designing for, can be addressed by using design techniques like progressive disclosure where you can drill down into advanced features or stay at the surface, or can be left to a competitor (LaTeX as a text editor for academic publications is a great example for that) willing to take on the challenge and able to operate in the smaller market of expert users.

Re:learning curves

[eldepeche]

Yeah, if you have two programs with identical feature sets but one has a shitty UI, you use the one that is easier. But between two programs used for the same task, lots of people will choose the more difficult one, since a complicated UI is typically correlated with a greater number of features.

I guess if you want your program to be everything to everyone, you want to find a way for novices to do what they need to do and not notice the advanced features, but have those advanced features easily available to the users who want them. This works well for something like a web browser, which typically won't have that many features, but the GP was probably talking about learning curves in general. Notepad has about the easiest UI of any program: you just type, then save. Nobody uses it though, because it doesn't do anything.

Re:learning curves

[Tom]

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'. While I agree to the general point, your example was chosen badly. 90% of word users are dummies.

(and now that the +1 Funny mods had their day, I can point out that I meant that seriously: Almost everyone who uses word uses it as a slightly enhanced text editor. A dummy version with almost all features completely hidden (not the abomination of MS "auto-hiding" that ranks high on the list of worst-ever-UI-ideas) is exactly what they'd need.)

Re:learning curves

[sm62704]

I think having programs that try to do everything for everybody are flawed in themselves, and it's one of the things I hate about Microsoft products. There'll be a thousand features, maybe ten of which I actually use, yet lacking in one or two features that I really want. Word, for example; I type and choose typefaces and sizes and that's about it. Yet I miss Word Perfect's "reveal codes" feature.

As to notepad, I use the hell out of notepad. I do drafts of my slashdot journals in notepad then paste in the browser, I (very infrequently) write letters to friends (Linda is the first person I've written in years, and she's in prison), and I use it for writing HTML.

Re:learning curves

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that there are some unspoken assumptions and misapplications of the term 'simple' that explains the difference between your position and Humanized's. In reality you're both on the same side.

The main issue is unnecessary complexity. Let's define complexity simply: more steps in any process is more complex. If steps can be removed without affecting functionality then that is desirable. I doubt anyone disagrees with that. For instance: close Word without saving something. You get a message "You have closed the program without saving. Continue? [Yes] [No] [Cancel]"

This is an example of a complicated interface. First, you have to read the message. Then you have to figure out what to do. Then you have to figure out which button does it. Then, if you save it, you have to give it a name. Then you can quit. This all assumes you press the proper button the first time round and don't lose your work.

That's four steps. It can be made simpler. Change the message to something like "You have unsaved work [Save] [Don't Save] [Don't Quit]"

Now you don't have to figure out what the buttons mean. This is quicker AND safer - less chance of losing your work. Now it's down to three steps. Less complex = better.

That's a simple example with a simple fix. You can do even better. You can get rid of the dialog completely by having an autosave feature with a document versioning system. Save differences from your last version every 5 minutes, and save differences on exit. Easy. No dialog boxes, no lost work, PLUS you get the benefit of a full version control system (an essential feature as far as I'm concerned). It's completely invisible to the user, keeps your data safe and gives you added functionality. This change is both effective and intuitive - it's possible to have both and I think that's Humanized's goal. Not Microsoft Bob.

Re:learning curves

[doktor-hladnjak]

Already been tried and killed nearly 5 years ago.

Re:learning curves

[jo42]

Why does everything today has to be "for dummies" or in "24 hour" Uhm, because people are stupid and lazy. And popular culture values style over substance.

Re:learning curves

[Tom]

The fact that a bad implementation of an idea was dumped doesn't mean that the idea was bad.

And we all know that MS never gets anything right the first time, they always need until version 3 before it's any good.

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

[hausrath]

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:robbIE should hire somebody

[Anonymous Coward]

yay! TheDailyWTF's amanfrommars has finally found /.

Take Heed Slashdot!

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe Slashdot should hire a few of those as well. "Retrieve more replys" Come on!

Re:Take Heed Slashdot!

[sm62704]

Maybe Slashdot should hire a few of those as well. "Retrieve more replys" Come on!

I like the way the Firehose links move right when I'm trying to click one. Great job, guys!

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

[Anonymous Coward]

some people like to move forward instead of standing still

Where does Mozilla get its money?

[tjstork]

i'm just wondering whose pumping money into them? google, ibm?

Re:Where does Mozilla get its money?

[ricebowl]

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

Re:Where does Mozilla get its money?

[heyguy]

They get a piece of Google's cut when you use the search bar in Firefox and buy something. I think Firefox made $70+ million last year (or that might have been 2006).

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.

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

[Filmcell-Keyrings]

They move stuff about at the supermarket to make you look around more, with the aim of making you buy more stuff. But I agree, it is annoying

Uh oh, Opera here I come

[sm62704]

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

Slashdot UI

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the change from yesterday's UI for slashdot, Slashdot has about 1 more week before it closes.

The problem wiht usability experts

[serviscope_minor]

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:The problem wiht usability experts

[BlueBoxSW.com]

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

Re:The problem wiht usability experts

[Shados]

The thing is, I don't think Firefox is targeting the same people as Vi. So thats definately not an issue here.

Re:The problem wiht usability experts

[ricebowl]

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 that Vi is 'impossible for beginners to quit...without a cheat sheet' suggests not that it's a vindication of keeping UI experts away, but instead that a UI expert should've been consulted at some point.

Easy-to-use doesn't necessarily equate to simplistic or a minimal feature-set. Though sometimes it does, of course. But mostly in those circumstances it's because the shiny-UI came before the feature-set.

Re:The problem wiht usability experts

[Chrisq]

Agreed. In vi you have to learn a lot to use it but its powerful
Notepad is straightforward but limited
JEdit is easy to use if you only need to do simple things, but the power is available for those who need it.

Re:The problem wiht usability experts

[gEvil (beta)]

You probably also wouldn't get something like vi today at all. The development of the vi interface was due to the constraints of the systems of the 70s. Those same constraints generally don't exist in modern systems today. For instance, the H, J, K, and L keys would never have been used for navigation if keyboards were developed with arrow keys.

Re:The problem wiht usability experts

[kellyb9]

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.

Re:The problem wiht usability experts

[eldepeche]

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.

Yeah, if you only need to use a program once.

Re:The problem wiht usability experts

[randomaxe]

...which is why they are called "usability experts" and not "application designers". vi is powerful, sure, but it takes most people a good deal of time to figure out how to use it. And when you really have stuff to get done, you don't have time to screw around with figuring out how to use an abstruse tool just because it is more powerful (there's a reason that I used pico rather than vi for most of my freshman year of college).

If someone were to turn good usability experts loose on vi, you'd sacrifice none of vi's power, but you'd get something that most people could teach themselves to use without having to reference a man page printout every thirty seconds.

The only people who should fear usability experts are those whose job security is based primarily on the fact that they know how to use one or more user-unfriendly and arcane tools.

Re:The problem wiht usability experts

[mjeffers]

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.

While this may be appropriate for a web-site where people will go, do something and maybe come back to at a later point ease-of-first-use isn't always appropriate. In the case of vi, or anytime when you're designing a tool for advanced work in a particular field, you need to look at designing more of an expert user interface. Just like the simple designs the problem is in identifying your users, where they are coming from and what they want to accomplish.

For a powerful text editor you have a system where users may live in the app for most of their productive time. You want to design that more like a space with a lot of room for customization and expansion and, since you know the users will be advanced, fairly powerful features. You can trade off some initial usability for flexibility and power.

Word is the right UI for my mom to write a letter and she'd be lost in vi. Vi is the right tool for my programmer friends to muck about with their work and they'd be stifled and unproductive in Word. Not saying vi can't be improved (and haven't used it recently enough to remember any big wins or flaws) but just that designing for 1st use has its place.

Re:The problem wiht usability experts

[Shotgun]

Good point, but try using Microsoft Word across a 2400baud modem. Where is it's usability then?

This is not a joke. Vi was not written with high-resolution graphic displays in mind. It was designed around a minimalist character display and keyboard that had less that 102 keys. One of the aspects of usability is that it has to actually work on the available hardware. The neatest features just aren't worth squat if they drag the machine to a halt. At least, that's what I hear from people trying to run Vista.

Re:The problem wiht usability experts

[Dragonslicer]

Many of us vi fanatics find everything else hard to use by comparison. Of course you do. That's what happens when the only thing anyone ever compares it to is emacs.

Re:The problem wiht usability experts

[YrWrstNtmr]

Yeah, if you only need to use a program once.

I'm building such a program now. About 1/3 of the eventual users will only use it once or twice a year, to do one simple task. It must be intuitive for them.

Re:The problem wiht usability experts

[Blakey Rat]

The problem wiht usability experts is that they would never come up with vi.

And that's a bad thing?

Re:The problem wiht usability experts

[serviscope_minor]

I think your point is misguided. Take this rewriting of it as an example:

When you have carpentry to get done you don't have time to figure out an abtruse tool like a plane or a mitre. That's why for the first year, I just nailed raw planks together.

If you're a programmer, as in a professional do it every day, day in day out you need to learn the tools of your trade, just like every other trade. You should learn a good editor or IDE, just like a carpenter needs to learn how to use woodworking tools.

Why does it matter having to put time in to learning a powerful tool if that tool makes you more productive? You'd put the time in to learning a complex and powerful language like python, so why not a complex and powerful editor in which to write it?

So, why don't you use pico anymore? Because you spent the time to learn a more abtruse tool (hard to get less than pico).

But anyway I don't fear usability experts. I am somewhat skeptical that usability experts are great at judging the needs of programmers as well as they are at judging the needs of non-programmer users. Not only that, but programmers are quite good at judging other programmers needs, since they do the same thing every day.

Re:The problem wiht usability experts

[Anonymous Coward]

Because there is no happy medium between a 2400 baud modem and running Vista.

OH WAIT, THERE IS.

Re:The problem wiht usability experts

[Anonymous Coward]

"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?"

"vi" was designed at a time when CRT terminals were fairly new and when the latter were sometimes called "glass TTYs". The key mapping of vi was designed to be reminiscent of a typewriter. How do you move one space to the right on a typewriter? The space key. Same in vi. How do you get to the beginning of the next line on a typewriter? Hit the "carriage return" key. Same in vi. How do you go one space to the left on a typewriter? Backspace. Same in vi. What do you do to "erase" a letter on a manual typewriter? Well you can use white-out or an eraser, but if you're limited to what's available on the typewriter, you type a bunch of X's over the mistake. Guess what? "x" is the delete key in vi.

There's *some* logic to the key mapping of vi. Of course, the typewriter metaphor has it's limits (what's the typewriter counterpart of "yanking N lines into a buffer"?), but by and large, keys are chosen to be mnemonic. "h", "j", "k", "l" were chosen to be the cursor keys probably because not all terminals at the time had cursor keys.

Re:The problem wiht usability experts

[randomaxe]

You're confusing the skill with the tool.

To correct your rephrasing:

"When you have carpentry to get done you don't have time to figure out an abtruse tool like a plane or a mitre. That's why for the first year, I did all of my woodworking with a hammer, a handsaw, and a chisel. I got the same result, it just took twice as long."

Re:The problem wiht usability experts

[kellyb9]

I totally agree. That wasn't my point. Usability isn't a totally new thing, but when it comes to computing, usability used to be a luxury. Now, it's an imperative. Vi was great back in the day, and as far as some people are concerned, it might be the most usable text editor out there. But for your average computer user today, it'll fall short every single time.

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

[Tribbin]

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

Simplicity.

[edgarhz]

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

From the site: 500 - Internal Server Error

Nice proposal.

lol

[Anonymous Coward]

The website cannot display the page HTTP 500 Most likely causes: The website is under maintenance. The website has a programming error. GJ SLASHDOT U RECKED EM UP

New company name

[SolitaryMan]

The should rename their company to "Slashdotted"

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

[moosesocks]

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

[zsouthboy]

Blender's interface is designed for ARTISTS who use the program - try again. It's an incredibly fast UI - there IS a learning curve, however.

I've been blending for years, and it just gets out of your way, and lets you get to work.

I get sick of people crapping on Blender - I use it instead of, you know, those other programs you have to pay money for? Those ones that I had no problem paying for before?

Seriously, I use it instead of 3DS/Maya.

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

[Bert64]

It's like vi, if you're used to the interface you won't want to use anything else, but if you're not used to it, then it can drive you insane.

Firefox is fine...

[Chris Snook]

...someone fix the GIMP!

Re:Firefox is fine...

[xtracto]

Mabe Mozilla could lend some of these guys time to the GIMP??

After all, they use the GIMP toolkit.

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:Firefox is fine...

[nogginthenog]

And Office 2007 while they're at it.

Re:Firefox is fine...

[Deanalator]

How about openoffice? So many friends of mine started using it instead of pirating ms office, and hit an immovable UI snag, and were right back to ms office.

Even the other day I was updating my resume, and spent about 15 minutes trying to figure out how to remove a hyperlink that automatically placed itself there (nothing more aggravating than a text editor that thinks it knows better than me). I eventually had to use google to find the solution.

The annoying thing is that I can remember at least 3 other times where I have done the same thing, but I use openoffice infrequently enough that I forgot what the solution was.

Re:Firefox is fine...

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with GIMP ?

Re:Firefox is fine...

[Just Some Guy]

Actually, there's already an available UI patch for GIMP.

Re:Firefox is fine...

[SharpFang]

You resize the main box, and the layout of buttons changes. They are in a multi-line text-like layout, so you just can't remember where each button is, their location always changes.

Most operations on the image popup window right over the drawing area. Make the image 50x50px on a 1600x1200 screen, and the popup will be over the image still. Meaning you have to move the popup away before you start the operation like crop, stretch, scale, etc. If by a chance the piece of image you want to process is visible, the canvas will go to foreground, hiding the popup. Lots of dragging stuff around just to click 'OK'.

No 'save dock'. You create a new dock, carefully arrange toolbox items in it, then use it. Then you hurry home, and quickly click the [x] on the dock instead of on main Gimp window. Bye, new carefully arranged dock.

The image must be in focus for shortcut keys to work. If you have any other window, say, color picker active, sorry, the shortcuts won't work. (of course the question is 'WHICH' image if you have many open. Well, duh, any answer like 'the first open, the last open, the last focused, marked as primary' and so on is better than 'none'.)

The magic scisors interface is a horror. You never know when you drag, when you add, when you are over the line or about to add a point just next to it and so on.

You can't perform an operation on a group of layers. There's simply no multi-select for layers. If you work on animated GIF (one layer = one frame) and need to perform some filter on all frames, well, you're out of luck.

When you paste something with ctrl-V, the initial placement of the pasted piece appears entirely random. Meaning if you paste a 5x5 piece into a 124x768 collage, you spend the next minute seeking, where it is. You usually 'select' a piece just to know where the thing will appear, because if selection exists, it appears at the selection.

Can't edit built-in brushes, that's understandable but you can't create a new one starting edit from a built-in one as a template.

No goddamned square 1x1px 100% hardness brush. And no, 'Circle01' is not it.

Move in connection with Guides - you can't move a small piece of image without moving the guides away first. If you need the guides exactly where they are, you're out of luck.

There are dozens of such problems more. I can't recall them all at once.

No sensible font preview

No selecting color 'transparent/alpha'. You can only apply eraser, you can't apply any other drawing tool with it.

OT: groceries

[sconeu]

They did that at my local market, under the guise of "standardizing across the chain".

Of course, nobody can find anything any more, and the reordering is not logical (some of the frozen organics are in the freezer section, others have been moved next to the veggies, etc...).

It's been 6 months now, and as you walk the aisles when you shop, you still hear people complaining that they can't find a damn thing.

Re:OT: groceries

[TheRaven64]

Sounds like someone has been using the islike operator a bit too freely.

Re:OT: groceries

[coolGuyZak]

My local supermarket did the same thing about 3 or 4 months ago, but their new layout rocks. Instead of the "usual" layout of keeping all like products together, they separated non-perishables by cuisine/culture. So, when I feel like Mexican, I rock the Mexican isle. When I want pasta, there's a sauce & pasta isle. Etc.

Some things stayed the same... Frozen foods are all together, produce is by the entrance, and the milk is still in the far corner... but overall, it's a vast improvement. At first, I didn't like it. About 2 weeks ago, a friend pointed out the new organization principle, and, able to understand it, I now love it.

It could be worse

[The Mighty Buzzard]

They could have hired the guys responsible for the EMACS UI to redo the UI.

Leaks?

[stu42j]

What leaks?

Re:Leaks?

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as the "UI" looks great people don't give a crap about how many leaks there are or how much resources shitty software needs. See Vista or OSX.

Unneeded... DO NOT WANT!!11!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Teh FOSS iz teh prefectly prefect model of prefect prefectshun!!!11!! We Teh FOSS dunt need they fansy UI dezine pplz, cuz teh Muzilar is teh alredy teh prefect UI dezine!!1!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:The problem with usability experts

[serviscope_minor]

The problem with 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 that Vi is 'impossible for beginners to quit...without a cheat sheet' suggests not that it's a vindication of keeping UI experts away, but instead that a UI expert should've been consulted at some point.

You misunderstand. The comment about quitting vi is merely an illustration about it's unusually steep learning curve. But does it mean a UI expert should have been consulted at some point? Maybe, but maybe not.

I'm not a beginner. I'm a professional programmer, of sorts and I use vi (gvim) every day for pretty much every task. Making it more obvious for a non vi user how to quit will not make it any easier for me (its target audience) to use. Therefore is it the correct choice? In fact, gvim has gone someway towards this by adding menu bars, and other common UI features. Of course, to a seasoned VI user, they take up valuable screen space and have to be disabled. Digging in the documentationn to find out how was quite time consuming, so it made it harder for a seasoned vi user. So, was it the correct choice?

Expert friendiness and beginner friendliness can be mutually exclusive. If you can make a program more expert friendly at the expense of beginners, then you probably should if the program is targeted at experts. This is one thing I like about programmers designing user interfaces. They're not afraid to target experts. When they get it right, it is really spot on. For what its worth, I do almost everything from the commandline and gvim. FVWM is a tool for arranging multiple xterms, etc. Of course, programmer designed interfaces aren't generally any good for beginners (sometimes they aren't good for anyone). But, I'm not a beginner, I'm a programmer. And no-one knows how programmers like to work better than other programmers.

Opera welcomes you

[Nicolay77]

Now that you mention Opera, they have a fair share of design innovations.

For example in mail. The now-loved then-hated model of not using a folder hierarchy but using views or labels and search to sort through email. Yes, it was in Opera before being in gmail.

The quick reply email and newsgroup button.

The quick dial buttons.

The middle mouse button scrolling. Yes, it's something that all browsers have, but here the difference is in quality. Different distances of the pointer to the origin have different scrolling speeds. It seems that the others use a linear scale while Opera uses a logarithmic scale or something like that, but it feels so much better than the others. The same with mouse gestures, their implementation shines above the rest.

Now, if you miss the search bar at the bottom, don't use Ctrl-F to search, use "." to search all the text and "," to search in links. Yes, this is a feature that's better in other software and can be improved in Opera. Nothing is perfect.

Re:Opera welcomes you

[Blakey Rat]

The middle mouse button scrolling. Yes, it's something that all browsers have, but here the difference is in quality. Different distances of the pointer to the origin have different scrolling speeds. It seems that the others use a linear scale while Opera uses a logarithmic scale or something like that, but it feels so much better than the others. The same with mouse gestures, their implementation shines above the rest.

I just tried it in Outlook, Firefox and Opera. I can't see any difference between the acceleration used. I did notice that Opera moves my mouse pointer when I activate it, which is a big no-no in UI design.

Re:Opera welcomes you

[Nicolay77]

That has been fixed in 9.5.

Obligatory question

[Stormwatch]

Can't the WINE team do the same? They REALLY could use a better interface, you know.

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

[Oligonicella]

If FF were unintuitive, I might agree. Since I'm using it right now and it's just fine, I don't.

If you want to change the interface, fine. But either allow users to fall back to the one they like or expect abandonment. A browser's a browser's a browser. Beyond browsing, I don't want clutter.

Wish more OSS would do this.

[Pedrito]

Frankly, I think Firefox is one of the few OSS projects that needs serious UI work. I find it more than adequate and I'm not sure a major overhaul is something I'll appreciate. But then again, I'm not a big fan of eye candy. I like simple, functional user interfaces far more than pretty, but less functional, ones.

On the other hand, there are a LOT of OSS projects that could use some serious help in the UI department. If you told me KDE or Gnome, or Gimp had done this, I'd be pretty excited. These projects could all use help, in varying degrees, in making their UIs more intuitive.

Humanized.com not following usability guidlines

[rHBa]

Only a small thing but the search form doesn't have a submit button (I know you can just press return but does everyone else?)

Also, (IMHO) Enso! What a stupid idea!!

Why would I want to hold down capslock and type 'open appname' to open an application?

Personally I have my most used apps (about 12 of them) in the quick launch tool bar (two mouse clicks and it's launched), even though I have to move from keyboard to mouse it's much more convenient than holding down capslock and typing two words with one and a half hands.

Also, what happens if you want to shout about OPEN SOURCE?

Can someone help me understand how this makes live easier?

Re:Humanized.com not following usability guidlines

[rHBa]

And what's with that feed reader? I can't work out how to get it to display a specific feed if I know the URL!

More editor trolling

[BenoitRen]

I wish editors like CmdrTaco would stop trolling with unrelated lines like "maybe-they-can-fix-the-leaks".

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

[jrothwell97]

'Familiar' does not necessarily equate with 'intuitive'.

Take the stupid menu systems found on many Windows apps (and in a lot of Linux and OS X) today. Items will be buried far down in the menus, difficult to find and confusing. Just a simple search box, or a tabbed Ribbon-like UI (for example, in Office 2007 or Sugar) would make menus so much easier to navigate.

Never mind that...

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the fuck are these people: http://blog.mozilla.com/

Sure, we know Asa but the rest?

The Office ribbon

[SEMW]

Microsoft nowadays seems to be breaking all UI standards just for the sake of the change. For instance, you can see several rants on ... Office's infamous ribbon. If the biggest rant you could find on Office's "infamous" ribbon is an article praising MS for making its minimize feature slightly more discoverable, I'd say that's a fairly resounding vindication of it...

Holy Unibrow Batman!

[PrescriptionWarning]

and monster chops to boot! (from the About Us page: http://www.humanized.com/gfx/header_aboutus.jpg )

I hate to be one to point out the shortcomings of others, but how can you expect to be a good user interface designer when something as simple as trimming some hair seems a daunting task?

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

[visualight]

I'm with you. I USE the "Go" button, but no matter how many times I about:config it back on, the next time I start Firefox it's hidden again.

I guess there was a study proving that the Go button confused users and we shouldn't have it.

I've done some studies and I've conclusively proving that my custom cluttered KDE interface is the most intuitive on the planet. Soon I will publish these studies and force everyone on the planet to use my designs.

nobody cares

[HeroreV]

With KDE, I setup Super + F (a.k.a. Win + F) to open Firefox with a particular profile (because I have multiple profiles setup). It's not that special.

Next time I'll tell you the shortcuts I assigned to rotating the screen and opening Kate (a text editor).

Re:nobody cares

[wampus]

Get AIDS and die, and your little fanboy friends, too. I was refuting the assertion that this type of UI is useless.

Does anyone want to buy a 4 digit UID, cheap?

Re:nobody cares

[Anonymous Coward]

How good is the karma? I take it from the above post not very well. Will 10 euros do?

Check out the Humanized "flaghship product".

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.humanized.com/enso/launcher/fingertips.php

It looks to me that it solves a problem that does not exist for a vast majority of users. Why one would want anything like this in a Firefox is beyond me.

an reply

[Anonymous Coward]

"an UI"? How are you pronouncing "UI"? Maybe you should become an hero.

Did you even look at the company?

[msimm]

I think it's *way* to early to speculate on what the results might be one way or the other, but Enso looks both innovative and discreet. I'm installing their software on my PC now.

Some other innovations Firefox has implemented have been fairly successful (inline spell-check, tabbed browsing, mouse gestures). And lets not forget if the changes don't improve the user experience I'm sure they can be disabled or we can remove them ourselves.

Anyway, it seems silly to be concerned about an attempt to improve and open browser. We should probably applaud it (don't a lot of people complain about OSS's lack of originality and interface design?), or at least hold our judgment for the final product.

Re:Did you even look at the company?

[sm62704]

I an holding judgement, although it still worries me a bit.

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

[Tribbin]

You are right.

Especially if the browser is going to be used for many years to come, any real improvement made now will benefit many.

excellent move!

[Tom]

Congratulations. UI design is one of the most under-appreciated areas of computers. Programmers thinking they can design an interface is like designers thinking they can code - except that it isn't as immediately obvious when they fail.

That's no monobrow....

[LinuxWhore]

That's a f'ing JONObrow!

Sorry. Couldn't resist.

There's nothing wrong with Firefox's UI now!

[SlappyBastard]

Jesus Christ, can people just leave things alone?

Perhaps they could take cues from Lynx

[ehaggis]

Certainly its not a busy, cluttered or difficult to navigate UI. There is no need to waste time on "shiny buttons". Lynx is the way to go. Even better, a browser based on VI navigation - now you have my attention!

Re:Perhaps they could take cues from Lynx

[Anonymous Coward]

Tried Conkeror?

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

[doktor-hladnjak]

So are you still using punchcards? a monochrome 80x25 fixed font text only display? Windows 1? twm? Like everything else in software, progress marches forward as people figure out what works best and as hardware improvements make new software techniques possible.

Too many choices

[version5]

From the about us page:

People love having choices, because having choices means having freedom. Well, we don't think this is necessarily a good thing when it comes to usability... For instance, Microsoft Windows provides you with at least three different ways to launch applications and services on your computer: desktop icons, a quick-launch bar, and a Start Menu.

Meanwhile...

Enso Launcher is designed to give you instant access to your applications and windows. With a few easily remembered keystrokes, you can launch an application, switch to a window by name, and control the state of your windows.

Windows has too many ways of launching applications, that's why they made one more. Thanks, Humanized!

Re:Too many choices

[75th Trombone]

And their one way involves memorizing keystrokes, while Windows's ways don't! Why doesn't everyone install it, I ask you??!

Oh sigh.

[ral8158]

Design is relatively subjective. I don't think it's right for me to critique design for being undesigned, because that quality is fairly ethereal. The 'designy-ness' of a design is directly proportional to the amount of work and thought put into it. I can think of many times when designed projects don't go over well with the public, but their popularity doesn't define the level of design. I don't know how much time or work they put into their website, so I don't know which choices are intentional and which ones are just whatever.

But really, green and white? Asian brushstrokes used as graphic? The 'bamboo beauty' theme has been done to absolute death. I wish Humanized the best, but I'm kind of dissapointed that Mozilla didn't spring for someone who wasn't quite so green.

Oh no!

[Wheely]

It may just be me but every project that has been attacked by a team of UI experts seems to become totally illogical, almost unuseable and utterly joyless shortly afterwards.

Work on what's broken and not the UI.

[MikeFM]

For the most part the Firefox UI is a pretty good balance of easy to use and powerful. From the description of these guys on their website I'm afraid they'll go nuts with trying to remove any flexibility.

Firefox's UI is good enough to only need the occasional minor improvement. I'd rather see them work on speed and stability. Opening one site that has buggy Javascript or Flash shouldn't take down the entire browser. Don't wank off on UI crap when there are still real problems with the underlying application.

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

[SolitaryMan]

The statement they're making by doing this is that they think the interface they have isn't satisfactory - isn't intuitive enough.

No, they just say they believe it can be better.

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

[mgblst]

Are UI designers more important that programmers? Well, I would say not, and I am sure most people here would agree with me. Why do we have to pay UI Designers and not programmers then? Because UI designers don't have the same ethics as we do. They don't do work for free, because they love it, and want to help people. A bit harsh, maybe, but still...

Innovate

[Anonymous Coward]

They used the word innovate TWICE. I'm not getting a good vibe.

Function before Form Please

[toyotabedzrock]

They should be worrying about fixing the memory leaks.