Setting A Good Example

One of the first tasks for the www.mozilla.org redesign project is to come up with a set of links to use as examples of what we’re wanting to do. I’ve made a short list of sites that I feel present a large and diverse amount of content in a clean way and that also have an active community engaged on the site:

• whitehouse.gov
• etsy.com
• starwars.com
• wordpress.org
• threadless.com
• icanhascheezburger.com

Note: I’m not serious about one of these sites. Guess which one.

Are there sites you’d add to this list (or remove)? Are there any examples of specific things you think we should be doing or things you think we should avoid? Please feel free to add your thoughts on this post or on our feedback wiki page.

Government As A Source of Innovation

There are some comments in one of Mitchell’s recent posts about the European Commission that I think are worth discussing more in depth. In the post, there is a statement that ‘There’s no disagreement that technology is best developed by technologists and entrepreneurs rather than government.’ I actually disagree with this and it looks like at least one other person does too.

Governments have been a source of an enormous amount of innovation (for example, radar, nuclear energy, aviation, adaptive optics, computers…*). Very often the source of the innovation is from military applications that find their way into civilian uses over time. A brief history of the Global Positioning System provides a great example of why working with governments is a smart idea.

GPS was created by the military starting in the 1960s. Due to advocacy from civilian agencies and the public who saw the value of this technology for their own uses, the government was persuaded to change their policy in 2000 and make the full signal available to non-military users. Thanks to that we have cool iPhone apps and cool Firefox extensions. There’s also a separate issue with this example. Governments are often the only ones able to provide certain technologies. For GPS, no company would have been able to pay for a 40 year R&D cycle that involved developing and launching a series of satellites before the service could be in place.

The reason I want to highlight this is to make sure we remain open to bringing new members in to our community. If we accepted the assumption that governments are inept and are best avoided, then we’d be missing out on bringing in a new partner to help us with our community’s goals. I believe that governments, at their best, can make enormous changes for the better in people’s lives. Certainly governments don’t always play a positive role, but we’re less likely to have negative outcomes if a bunch of enthustiastic people who believe strongly in something get engaged in the process.

* I spent two years studying science and technology policy recently and I could go on and on about this topic but I’ll stop the list here.

Bringing Personality Back

We are about to start a project to create a new design for the www.mozilla.org site and we will need your help. There are no designs to look at yet, but we have started posting some information on the wiki, including a design brief and a feedback page for initial ideas and comments.

There hasn’t been a redesign in over four years and the current look does not reflect the site’s current role of being an entry point for the entire community. To fill that role the site needs to reflect the personality of the community, but right now the site doesn’t reflect much personality at all.

There are reasons why the site looks the way it does and it will provide some context for this new project to review past site designs.

1998: A developer-focused site

When www.mozilla.org launched in 1998 the mission for the site was to be a place to integrate the code and coordinate the activities of people creating their own products. Mozilla had no products of its own and users were not part of the intended audience for the site. The hack artwork and constructivist design fit this developer-focused community very well.

2004: A brown product-focused site

As the community evolved, it started to create products that were intended for users and the site needed to evolve to make it easy for people to find, install and use those products. This change in focus is seen in the design—information about the products are prominently featured, much of the developer content is taken off of the home page and the previous visual design is replaced with a design that does not distract people.

2005: A blue product-focused site

The brown product-focused site was soon replaced by a blue product-focused site, but the goal of the new design remained the same. Soon after this design was put in place though, the www.mozilla.com site was launched and served as the new location for presenting information about Mozilla’s products to users. For www.mozilla.org, this left a product-focused design but the site no longer had a product-focused role.

2009: A community-focused site

Now that we are moving the site into its new role as an entry point for the community, we have a lot of freedom to bring a strong personality back to the design to reflect our community. The community has changed dramatically since 1998 though, so this is not just a matter of returning to the design as it was in 1998.

The community now is so much bigger (in both size and scope) than it was then. There are products being created, not just by Mozilla but also by a wide range of people using Mozilla’s code. There are also many activities going on that go beyond products and code, including design, education and philanthropy.

We don’t know what the new design should look like, but we’ll figure it all out with the community as we kick off this design project. Look for more soon.