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UI Designers Hired by Mozilla

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the maybe-they-can-fix-the-leaks dept.

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.""

10 of 245 comments (clear)

  1. More Raskins by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:More Raskins by Evil+Adrian · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      evil adrian
    2. Re:More Raskins by xtracto · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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!

      --
      Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
  2. Mayby they can send them to by Respawner · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:Mayby they can send them to by eln · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Mayby they can send them to by emaname · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

      --
      An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
  3. Ka-ching! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  4. Re:good by filbranden · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:I don't want innovative, give me easy, familiar by hausrath · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:learning curves by Unordained · · Score: 5, Informative

    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'.