New name for Firefox Personas

[Amy Tsay]

Hi everyone,

I'm Amy, the new community manager for add-ons, and I wanted to
introduce myself and say hello. I know there's been some concern and
confusion around renaming BrowserID so I wanted let you know what the
transition from BrowserID to Mozilla Persona means for Firefox
Personas (http://bit.ly/A8Yff2). We really appreciate your patience
and understanding as we work through these transitions.

Firefox Personas will be renamed to "themes." Here's some background
on their new name and how the decision was made:

After a lot of thought, including consideration of the community poll
results, we're planning to make "themes" the name for custom visual
changes to Firefox, whether through Personas or existing themes
(http://bit.ly/wKRQpD). We think it's easiest for a user trying to
change Firefox's look to go to a single place without worrying about
the difference is between a "theme", a "background", and a "skin".

For people who do know the difference and only wish to browse one type
of theme, we'll distinguish "background themes" (current Personas)
from "complete themes" (current themes). We know that current theme
designers put many hours of work into their styles to totally
transform every aspect of the Firefox UI, and hope that a single
themes area featuring both themes and Personas will help more users
discover complete themes who otherwise wouldn't.

As many of you know, we've been in the process of migrating the
Personas website (http://www.getpersonas.com) into https://addons.mozilla.org
with all of our other add-ons, and we plan to finish that process in
the coming months. When Personas have finished the migration to their
new home, they'll be called themes. Until then, our websites will
continue to refer to them as Personas or Persona themes.

In case you're curious, out of more than 1,000 responses to our naming
poll, "themes" came in second place with 22% of the votes behind
"skins" with 41% of the votes. We considered "skins", but it drew many
negative reactions and associations and ultimately felt it's less
confusing if we unify all of our themes under a single name.

Hope this helps, and as always feel free to post your thoughts…

Sincerely,
Amy

[Patrick Finch]

Hi Amy,

Thanks for sharing.

I don't think that anyone would hold up renaming products and reusing
names as a best practice, but this makes sense to me.

Personally, I felt in 2009 that this was the right name... if you ask
anyone to describe Personas for Firefox in a sentence, the word "theme"
would tend to appear, users clearly understand the term and it's
something of a standard.

In my opinion, if we do not intend to build a brand around a product or
feature (by which I mean investing in a trademark), then the most
appropriate course of action is to name a feature to be as approachable
as possible, also for a global audience.

Patrick

> _______________________________________________
> Interested in promoting Mozilla? Check out the Mozilla Community Marketing Guide: http://contribute.mozilla.org/Marketing
> mark...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/marketing

--
Patrick Finch
Mozilla
pat...@mozilla.com
Mobile: +46 768 444 833
Office: +1 650 903 0800 ext. 340
Twitter: @patrickf
IM: patric...@gmail.com

[Robert Kaiser]

Amy Tsay schrieb:

> For people who do know the difference and only wish to browse one type
> of theme, we'll distinguish "background themes" (current Personas)
> from "complete themes" (current themes).

Just a detail: Did we consider to call them "lightweight themes" instead
of "background themes" where we are even making that distinction? This
is only because they're called "lightweight themes" or "lwthemes"
internally in Firefox code and this would "magically" match that
internal naming. ;-)

Robert Kaiser

[Majken Connor]

I agree that there should be better names to distinguish the two, but I
haven't been able to come up with specifics yet so i refrained from
replying. Some thoughts I've had so far are that the differences between
the two are kinda like the differences between redecorating and renovating,
though those words are even more abstract. Background IMO doesn't work
because it doesn't seem to be in the background. "complete" could be more
compelling to, to show the extra work people have put in.

I was thinking "instant" or "quick" themes for former personas. Maybe the
word "refresh" or "overlay"? It'd be interesting to do a similar poll about
renaming the "full" themes, see what kind of words people associate with
those.

> ______________________________**_________________

> Interested in promoting Mozilla? Check out the Mozilla Community Marketing

> Guide: http://contribute.mozilla.org/**Marketing<http://contribute.mozilla.org/Marketing>
> mark...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/**listinfo/marketing<https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/marketing>
>

[Marcio Galli]

Some approaches my 1.99 cents to this:

1) We check what are the chances of really going for themes, mixing
results in AMO, and making a clear "advanced" distinction and
outstanding file size ( and maybe other aspects .)

2) Check if these "skins" are only working for the default theme. If
so, then perhaps a view is to think that these are settings to an
existing default theme. So, for example, imagine I go to Tools ->
Default Theme -> Skins. This way I am saying that Skin ( or Decoration
) is an argument, a customization, a parameter, under the default
theme.

Marcio

On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 7:28 PM, Majken Connor <maj...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I agree that there should be better names to distinguish the two, but I
> haven't been able to come up with specifics yet so i refrained from
> replying. Some thoughts I've had so far are that the differences between
> the two are kinda like the differences between redecorating and renovating,
> though those words are even more abstract. Background IMO doesn't work
> because it doesn't seem to be in the background. "complete" could be more
> compelling to, to show the extra work people have put in.
>
> I was thinking "instant" or "quick" themes for former personas. Maybe the
> word "refresh" or "overlay"? It'd be interesting to do a similar poll about
> renaming the "full" themes, see what kind of words people associate with
> those.
>
> On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 1:53 PM, Robert Kaiser <ka...@kairo.at> wrote:
>

>> ______________________________**_________________
>> Interested in promoting Mozilla? Check out the Mozilla Community Marketing
>> Guide: http://contribute.mozilla.org/**Marketing<http://contribute.mozilla.org/Marketing>
>> mark...@lists.mozilla.org
>> https://lists.mozilla.org/**listinfo/marketing<https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/marketing>
>>

> _______________________________________________
> Interested in promoting Mozilla? Check out the Mozilla Community Marketing Guide: http://contribute.mozilla.org/Marketing
> mark...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/marketing