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

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: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.