Designed a home tab for the new Mozilla browser
What better way to spend a Saturday afternoon than mocking-up a home tab for the new Mozilla Browser :)
(Having uploaded my Mozilla Home Tab Challenge video submission to vimeo, I've realized I'd gone overboard with the length of my video - over 10min - hope mozilla guys won't punish me for it.)
Anyway, here's a quick run down of my proposal:
1. Home tab is a place where you should begin your browsing experience, not where you read your emails, chat to people or manage your extensions. I've seen many submissions that run a lot of these functions and I think this is too much.
2. I believe browsers should finally adopt a log-in option. This would allow for remembering sessions, settings and bookmarks between your home computer and office machine. Also, I propose that browsers learn your behavior and browsing patterns, so that when you come back from work and open your home computer, the home tab wouldn't offer you the work related page, but the page you're likely be browsing in your leisure time.
3. Common solution to the home tab these days is displaying a matrix of site screenshots tipping you where to go. I think it's cute, but not ideal. These thumbnails do not do a great job at representing specific content as they're just high level screenshots of the page. Much better way of showing an informative summary of a site/page is what facebook does with the links you publish on your wall. They automatically generate a text snippet of that page, add a visual cue on what the link is about and include a title / header. This is a more superior way of displaying page thumbnails and I go with this approach in my project. On top of that I introduced a site view. Site view contains just logos of sites and below each logo show top level domain names. Page view, in contrary, display a low-level facebook style thumbnail as well as the full URL. At any time you can switch between the site view and the page view, depending on whether you want to find particular content / article or just want to go the the site you've bookmarked a while ago.
4. Last but not least. I believe browsers shouldn't be only about rendering html. First and foremost they should help users...browse and discover new content. Sites like stumbleupon, digg or delicious really exploited lack of that mindset among browser product managers. Think about it. Firefox (or any other browser for that matter) is in much better position to tell me what hot new content I might be interested in. Not digg or others, but Firefox. They churn tons of relevant information about my browsing behavior, what time I go where, what sites I had visited before & after, how long I spent on each page, what was likely to trigger me leaving the page. Not only can they see this thread of information about me, but they can tap into the patterns of millions of users, datamine and produce great recommendations based on my location, interests and demographics (provided I agree to disclose them) or time (hot sites vs evergreens).
There are 2 sections in the header of my home tab: my sites & hot sites.
My sites are either those that I visit regularly, visited recently or am likely to visit now, dubbed - current, as well as my bookmarks.
Hot sites are the pages recommended by my friends on facebook, twitter and other social platforms, as well as sites recommended by the firefox itself, as per my comments above - named suggestions.
Here are the wireframes:
Current tab - sites view (squares with crosses are big logos of the sites)
Current tab - pages view
Bookmarks tab
Friends tab
Suggestions tab
8 comments
Feb 14, 2010
Maciek Saganowski said...
hehe, mate, I love hearing about your cats :) just don't want to have them on my "suggestions" tab
Feb 17, 2010
Michael Sliwinski said...
Very nice design suggestions, mate!But... I'm not sure if you aren't over-complicating the home tab with so many options. Also the amount of sites placed on one sub-tab (current/bookmarks/friends) may be just too much. I don't like "too many choices". And I think instead of lorem ipsum and blank logos you should have just put some logos of some example sites, this would look a lot better as it's hard to imagine how the home tab looks like (and if there is too much content or not) without any real content.
Other than that, great work and cool ideas. Liked the implementation of friends tab and suggestions. Hope Mozilla guys will take at least some of it under consideration + they'll make the Firefox work faster and we've got a great browser!
Feb 18, 2010
Maciek Saganowski said...
you have a point mate, keep in mind, only "complications" I'm proposing are tabs and a little switch between page vs site view. Possibly it looks complex on the wireframe, but in practical terms, I don't think it would appear so complex to the user.True with Lorem ipsum and logos, as always I was running out of time so had to go cheap and fast, you're right colors and logos would work wonders. Thanks for kind words mate :)
Feb 20, 2010
Tom Sieron said...
Thumbs up on the sites view idea. Would be interesting if they breathed new life into the good ole' favicon.One thing I'd have second thoughts about, is the idea of having tabs inside the home tab, perhaps because I like to see as much at one time as it's possible.
In general – some great ideas, liked those specificity sliders too, tho this might be a tad too ambiguous for newcomers.
Feb 20, 2010
Maciek Saganowski said...
Yeah, I realize double row of tabs is pushing the envelope a bit, still I used it as to avoid side menu which would reduce the width and add visual clatter. Still worth checking out 2 versions. As for sites view vs pages view - I'm quite passionate about this one :)
