Rockmelt

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mozbiz

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Mar 21, 2012, 3:41:08 PM3/21/12
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I used this as my default browser before joining Mozilla 7 months ago. Curious how evolved the thinking is around UI and how it compares to Rockmelt's?

Michael Hanson

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Mar 26, 2012, 7:35:11 PM3/26/12
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I'd say we have a wide-open slate for UI experimentation right now.  But here's my 2 cents:

I think that social cues are very, very powerful - in text, chat, voice, or video.   Any UI that includes faces of my peers and family is going to present a strong, constant stimulus.  A request for attention from a social peer carries with it an entire train of obligation, reciprocity, politeness, and other complex social behaviors.

When my tools connect me meaningfully with someone I care about, it can be delightful - a high point of my day.  But when there is nothing there for me, strong repeated social stimuli are going to be fatiguing, distracting, and annoying.

What this means in UI terms is that we should adopt the lightest possible design touch.  A social notification is the most powerful thing my computer or phone can do to get my attention, and we should treat it with that respect - which includes never pushing it on users, and providing many ways to hide, constrain, or minimize it, if necessary.

If this sounds like I think the UI of Rockmelt (and Flock, and a whole host of Firefox social addons) is too busy... then, yes, I do think that.  But I also grant that it is a very difficult design challenge, and that different users want different experiences from their tools.  There is room for many renderings of the social universe, here.

I'll also raise another UI challenge, which is that we are experimenting with providing social surfaces that are "in the browser" - but rendered from service provider's content.  That creates a platform with tremendous flexibility and creative possibilities, but it also means that we have to depend on providers to design appropriate visual elements.  We can resize, minimize, and hide content - but we can't fix a bad color scheme or too-rapid updating.  That will require a co-evolution of design principles, which is a process that has been ongoing for the last several years and will continue for many more.

Josh Rose

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Apr 28, 2012, 3:42:35 PM4/28/12
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I understand the idea of "business," but personally would love to have an option to have a Yoono-style sidebar with my social network updates flowing through them.  I like to stay connected during the day, and if this could be an option built-in, but available to turn off for those who like a quieter, less messy browsing experience, that would be ideal, I would think.
Just my two cents.

g2010a

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Apr 30, 2012, 5:04:28 AM4/30/12
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Or a sort of news ticker continually scrolling (with *very* muted
colors until mouseover... nothing more annoying than colorful
scrolling text).

Chris Hofmann

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Apr 30, 2012, 3:18:23 PM4/30/12
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Yeah,  rather than thinking about modifications to the browser to fit any kind of "social" moniker it might be more useful to think of it in terms of "persistent content" that's part of the browser chrome.

There are streams of updating content that come from a variety of sources that users are interested and they stretch way beyond social sites.

Of course there have been a lot of experiments trying to display these streams of content in persistent parts the chrome and none have really taken hold.   We should look at lessons learned from as far back as Netscape's "Netcaster" and The Netscape 6 UI that had a persistent sidebar that users could customize with "channels" from a variety of sources.

http://web.archive.org/web/20010207151441/http://home.netscape.com/browsers/6/help/sidebar.html

The problem that showed up in research on usability of these kind of persistent content features is that many users see them as a distraction.   If they are engaged with a social networking site they will have a full page or tab open dedicated to that interaction.  If they are doing something else notification and updates to part of the chrome are seen as a distraction from the current task or browsing activity.

mhanson mentions the connections that can be "delightful", and I agree that's possible, but the content provider has a hard time figuring out what small part of the large body of content will meet this bar, and providing filtering out the rest that looks more like noise to the user.   The user can bet invovled in this filtering but then it turns into another thing they need to "manage" in the browser.  Anything that needs to be managed usually turns out to be a feature that doesn't gain wide spread use.

-chofmann


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