Mozilla UI Designer: more help on Firefox Interface Design

According to foreign media reports, at the Web 2.0 Expo conference recently held in San Francisco, Mozilla's user experience designer Aza Raskin said, in terms of interface design, Mozilla needs more external help and talks about Firefox's improvements and directions on the user interface.

Raskin, 24, is also in charge of some of Mozilla's experimental projects, such as Ubiquity, Weave, and other conceptual products. Raskin's late father was Apple's Macintosh computer designer. Raskin terminated his PhD and founded Humanized, a man-machine interface design company. The company was acquired by Mozilla in September. Raskin entered the Mozilla Foundation to design user interfaces and user experience for Firefox and other products.

At the Web 2.0 Expo conference, Raskin said Mozilla needed more help from the outside in terms of interface design. He also mentioned some interesting data, "Each Mozilla employee corresponds to 1.2 million users. About 1000 programmers are writing code for Firefox, and about 0.1 million are responsible for Firefox testing ."

However, there is little help in interface design. In Raskin's view, the design will enhance the user interface of Firefox and other Mozilla products to a new frontier. "Currently we only have two designers, so it would be a huge opportunity if we were willing to be involved," he said. "What we do will impact 1/5 of the population on the planet ."

Raskin also talked about Mozilla's design to be improved in the next step, with labels at the top. It's okay to open a few labels in the browser. Once too many labels are opened, there will be problems, so "I think we will carry out more innovative designs on the labels ."

Firefox's new "most frequently browsed web pages" function lists the websites that you visit most frequently at different times every day, and allows you to directly search for website content.

In addition, Firefox will be able to remember the pages that users recently visited and use this information to optimize the user's Internet experience. For example, each time you open a new tab, Firefox will prompt you for the pages you recently visited, and read the latest content from the RSS feed of these pages, which is displayed on the new tab.

Firefox 3 has made some minor adjustments on the interface, but there have been no major changes since the browser's "backward" button has been magnified by two times. Under the control of Raskin, most Firefox interface adjustments may be embedded with some simple functions. For example, the recent Ubiquity project of Mozilla lab is actually a command line interface, it is used to improve the interaction between users and sites, so that users can use "Email to sb etc" in the webpage. "Such a simple command line statement, the current page or the default specified information to the user, such as sending an email ).

Will this be the new direction of Web browsing? Not necessarily. Raskin believes that this is a trend in interface design, that is, more practical functions are developed around the websites we use on a daily basis.

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