Redesign Brown Bag Today

Just posting a reminder that there is a brown bag today at 1 pacific about the www.mozilla.org redesign. Join us in person if you’re in Mountain View, online at air.mozilla.com or over the phone at +1 800 707 2533 (pin 369) Conf# 8600.

The Mozilla.org Redesign: Round 2

Happy Cog has just posted their second round of designs. This latest concept incorporates the feedback we received over the past two weeks and the new ideas we’ve had about how to approach the site’s content. There are two concepts that show variations on how we could approach the use of color.

Please feel free to post on this blog or on the Redesign Mozilla site with your comments. You are also welcome to come to a brown bag tomorrow at 1 pacific (either in person at the Mountain View office or virtually over Air Mozilla) to discuss this latest round of concepts. The video of the discussion about the first round of designs has also just been posted.

Concept 1, Round 2

Please Stop Stealing Our Ether

My friend Rob and I used to create cartoons for The Daily Texan when we were in college and we tried hard to make a career out of it. I was pretty upset that our plan didn’t work (in part because I had no backup option figured out) but I’m OK with it now—except when I see our jokes show up in other places.

We’ve seen our jokes show up on The Simpsons, The New Yorker, Saturday Night Live and other places. I’m not suggesting that anything was stolen—these ideas are in the ether and anyone can grab them*. It’s just frustrating to have had The New Yorker reject dozens of submissions when we see an almost exact duplicate of our idea show up in one of their issues (The New Yorker’s version said “We’ll always have that time we went to the mall”).

If you share our frustration over this issue, feel free to contact The New Yorker and tell them to write me back.

* It’s interesting to see that the duplicated ideas are all fairly simple plays on words (“Just Got Marred” instead of “Just Got Married” or “Oh, The Hilarity” instead of “Oh, The Humanity”). If any of the ideas that weren’t plays on words, like one of these, got copied, then it would seem a bit fishy.

Feedback On First Round Of Designs

I was happy to see that we received a lot of useful feedback on the first round of design concepts for www.mozilla.org. Although there wasn’t unanimous agreement on everything, it does seem that some themes emerged from the comments. I thought it would be useful to post about this in case I’m missing something obvious or I’m way off-base about something.

High-Level Feedback

Concept #1 — people responded well to how clean it was, but seemed to think it was cold and corporate overall.

Concept #2 — people responded very well to the overall look, but there were some issues with some specific parts such as the 123.

Concept #3 — people responded very well to the interactivity and many people preferred this design although others thought this looked too grungy.

There seemed to be general agreement that the designs were too heavy and pushed too much content below the fold. There were similar concerns about how these designs would look on devices with small screens.

The blue and orange-blue color schemes didn’t feel like Mozilla to many people.

There were some comments that www.mozilla.org should be a place to download software or be a site focused on developers. It has served both of these purposes in the past and the transition to a new role will probably seem wrong to some.

There seemed to be some confusion about the mozilla.org and mozilla.com sites. Some comments indicated that people didn’t understand the difference betweent the two and other comments were combining the two (Why should we redesign the site when it was just redesigned…).

Comments from l10n community members strongly suggest we don’t put text in images. It is probably worth exploring what is possible with new downloadable font functionality.

Some people mentioned the downside of the interactivity in #3—as a community we are not always able to respond to all of the feedback we get. This is not a reason not to add more interactivity, but we should be selective about it to help us consolidate feedback so there can be a critical mass of discussion and to also make sure we’re not going to overwhelm our ability to engage with people.

Note: I left out some feedback about the details of the designs, such as font choice, since these issues will get worked out in the next rounds after we get the general direction sorted out. For the next round, look for new designs next week.

Our Hybrid Didn’t Like The Short, Mild Winter

I’ve noticed that our average gas mileage has gone down lately—we used to get in the low 30s MPG and now we’re in the mid to high 20s MPG. Our driving pattern hasn’t changed much, so I assume this is because the temperature has dropped to a not-so-chilly 50° or so lately.

There are a few reasons why hybrids don’t like winter (engines need to warm up, the heater eats up energy, tire pressure goes down (although I added more air recently)) but I had assumed that this applied to cars in places that actually got cold. Hopefully it is the weather though and mileage will go back up soon.

One thing that makes me think it might not be the weather is the odd consumption information the car tracks. In the picture above my average mileage is 25 MPG, but my best mileage is 21 MPG although I had reached 60 MPG at one point over the last thirty minutes. Maybe I’m just misunderstanding things, but the car’s manual had an example of this screen where the best number was actually higher than the average number. Maybe the computer is just counting things wrong?

Rethinking Content As Well As Design For www.mozilla.org

One thing that really stood out for me with the first set of concepts for the www.mozilla.org redesign is that we haven’t been using the site very effectively to tell Mozilla’s story. The current home page just includes links to projects plus links to a few key pages and features some news feeds—there’s not even any text that provides an introduction to the site.

Each of the three concepts includes some ideas about how we could tell our story better. These are just some initial ideas though and we need to figure out what content to include in the finished version of the site. Earlier today we had a call to start going over these ideas and there is a draft proposal below.

If you have suggestions or ideas about this, feel free to add some thoughts here or join us next week on March 26 at 1 pm pacific for a brown bag to review the next set of designs.

Navigation and Home Page Content Draft

Top-Level Navigation

• Learn About Mozilla
• Our Community
• Our Projects
• Our Mission
• Get Involved?

Home Page Content

• Intro area
• 3 projects (Firefox, Thunderbird and rotating area for SeaMonkey, Bugzilla, Camino, Lightning) — note this is projects not products
• 3 slots for Foundation?, Mozilla Store and rotating area for various initiatives (accessibility, education, research…)
• News feed w/3 entries
• Blog feed w/3 entries?

Footer

• Space for principles / quote / question / call to action
• Established in 1998 — link to history page?
• Expanded vertical set of links from top nav like on www.mozilla.com
• Copyright and Privacy Policy information
• Last modified, Document History and Edit this Page links (unless this goes higher up in body of pages)

Questions

• How much content is too much? How much is too little?
• How should we refer to the various non-coding activities, such as the new education work? Initiatives, Activities, Our Mission?
• Is “Get Involved” or “Contribute” a good navigation item or should this information be incorporated other ways in each page?
• Do we need to reserve space on home page for the Mozilla Foundation?
• Is a news feed and planet feed too much? How else can we show the activity of the community without overwhelming people with information?

Meeting On Monday To Discuss Content For www.mozilla.org Designs

Just posting a quick note to let people know that we’re having an open meeting on Monday at 10 pacific to discuss content issues related to the www.mozilla.org redesign project. If you’re interested in helping us tell the Mozilla story and making the new www.mozilla.org site a useful resource for the community, stop by. Call details are available on our planning wiki page.

My Two Cents

The first round of www.mozilla.org design concepts were posted yesterday afternoon and we’ve already received a lot of great feedback. Please keep sending in your thoughts. Here are my own two cents about the designs.

Concept #1 was my favorite initially since it felt like it presented information about the community in a very clean and compelling way. Although this design might make the best portal, it doesn’t have the personality or emotion of the other ones. For the next round, I’d be interested in seeing how we could bring over some of the cleanness from here into the other designs.

Concept #2 looks the most like Mozilla to me and the idea of evolving the constructivist style of the original site feels like the right approach. To fully bridge the old and new sites, I’d be interested in seeing a variation of this design that uses a red and orange palette and that also explores how to bring in a star—perhaps as bullets in the list of navigation items?

Concept #3 does some very cool things with engaging people and there are some really exciting Manifesto page ideas included in these designs. That having been said, the design itself feels the least like Mozilla to me. It would be interesting to see how the ideas of interacting with people fit in another design.

Overall all of the designs take up a bit too much space and push too many things below the fold. This seems like just part of the process though as we start out by exploring what’s possible and then work on narrowing down our options and ideas into a final design.

I also have a bunch of nitpicky type things, but wanted to keep my feedback limited to high-level direction. There will be time to figure out where to move things, how to reword text and what fonts to change.

The Mozilla.org Redesign: Round 1

The following is a guest blog post from Happy Cog that provides some information about each of their initial designs for www.mozilla.org. Please feel free to provide feedback on this blog post, at Thursday’s design lunch or on other places.

Redesigning Mozilla.org to be a worthy showcase of what Mozilla stands for is an exciting project. Opening these designs up to the Mozilla community for feedback is a humbling task, but the rewards of a larger collaborative endeavor ultimately benefit us all. Exposing these designs at an early stage in their development creates a powerful communication channel to help us find out what works, what doesn’t work, and start an open dialog with the community.

The work we are presenting reflects the direction established by the community and has been articulated in the Big Picture document on the Mozilla wiki. Please give it a read – and also take a look at the Communication Brief that details Happy Cog’s understanding of the project goals. Even at the early stages of this project, Happy Cog is elated to be working directly with the Mozilla team and community and bringing to life an important site in the very awesome and ever growing Mozilla universe.

Concept 1: Established and Progressive Mozilla

The content and purpose of the current Mozilla.org is cloudy. Is this site a portal for those who are looking for something else? What do we want users to take away from a visit to this site? Do folks understand this is an established organization with clear goals that effect internet users on a worldwide scale?

This design attempts to establish Mozilla at the center of all those ideas; global, trusted, and a progressive open community that wants each and every web user to understand their values and contribute in some way.

Concept 2: Constructivism Goes Mod

The brand identity of Mozilla was built on the idea of “Revolution” but what if the “Revolution” was over? What if Mozilla was now the ideal – the utopia of software creation? What if Mozilla was the victor in all-things-internet? Can constructivism reinvent itself as modern movement?

This concept attempts to evolve the constructivist aesthetic into a postmodern style that would make artists like Robert Rauschenberg proud. Mixing oil paint, stenciled images of the Dinosaur head, and numbers that act as interactive elements and various visual ephemera result in an extension of the Mozilla brand look-and-feel that plays homage to the assemblage and collage work the some of the finest modern abstract painters.

Concept 3: The “Do you like me? Circle yes/no” concept

How can we make the learning experience of Mozilla as easy as clicking one button? Can this action also help to build upon the idea that all-things Mozilla are driven by the actions of the community?

This concept approaches the idea of a low-barrier entry as an interactive question that allows users new and seasoned to help shape content that matters. Visually, the look is a weathered take on the constructivism aesthetic.

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The floor is now yours. Let us know your thoughts on these solutions. Are the concepts solid? Is the content engaging? Should there be less products, more news? Or more products and less news? Is there something about the community that isn’t being represented that you would love to see?

Drop us a comment and let’s start the conversation…

How To Provide Feedback On www.mozilla.org Designs

The first round of concepts for the www.mozilla.org redesign are going to be posted this week and I wanted to let people know about the different ways they can provide feedback:

• At the design lunch on Thursday at 12 pacific (this should also be online at air.mozilla.org)
• On my blog and on other people’s blogs
• On the wiki pages for the redesign
• At SXSW (look for someone from Happy Cog and give them your feedback)

Any thoughts, comments or suggestions are welcome, although we are hoping to get some specific comments about how well these concepts address the high-level goals for the site and the following design challenges:

• To bring the personality of the Mozilla community back to the site
• To create a usable and attractive entry point for the whole community that covers a wide range of users and dozens and dozens of community sites
• To design a layout that will be usable on both desktops and mobile devices