The Concept Series is an open forum for sharing your ideas, expertise & vision for the future of the Web, the Mozilla project and Firefox. Collectively, we explore design directions, develop ideas and turn them into mock-ups & prototypes.

Contacts

Design Challenge

Welcome

The Mozilla Labs Design Challenge is a series of events to encourage innovation, and experimentation in user interface design for the Web. Our aim is to provoke thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole. [more]

The Brief

Mozilla Labs recently launched a series of experiments around your online identity, contacts and the relationship you have with other people. With Contacts, we’ve enhanced your browser by making it aware of your online contacts and friend lists. You can then search and browse your contacts in the browser, and a website can ask for permission to access them through an API. [more]

For this Design Challenge we focus on finding creative solutions to the question: "What are the interesting uses of having a complete list of all your contacts and relationships in your browser, for both local browser applications and services on the web?"

About Contacts

Contacts is an experimental add-on from Mozilla Labs, which enhances Firefox by making it aware of your online contacts and friend lists. You can then search and browse your contacts in the browser, and a website can ask for permission to access them through an API.

Why is this information important? Address books and buddy lists have become an integral part of how we manage our relationships online. Your email addresses, twitter handle and openID are used in hundreds of ways as you connect, follow and share online.

Every desktop operating system, and hundreds of web-based service providers, has some way of representing "who-you-know". Managing all of this information can be a lot of work. There are multiple copies of your data, and they are inconsistent and disjointed.

This information is also special, because it represents the boundary between "my data" and "your privacy". When you disclose your friends’ email addresses on a website (maybe you want to invite them to a cool new site you just joined), you are trusting the website to keep that address private. At most sites today, you do this by sharing an entire contact list from some other website (say, your Yahoo address book), and don’t have much ability to restrict what information gets shared. The disclosure of your friends’ contact information is an important step: we think you should be in control of it.

How it works:

The Contacts prototype consists of these pieces:

A browser-based Contacts database that stays in sync with your address books (so far, it supports Facebook, GMail, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Twitter, Yahoo and Mac OS Address book)
A generic connector system for Contacts from desktop or web-based address books (so you can implement missing ones)
An email autocompletion feature, which demonstrates how the browser can auto-complete email addresses on any website. The autocompletion is performed entirely in the browser, without sharing the your list of contacts with the website.
A Javascript API that websites can use to access the Contacts database, with explicit user permission and filtering.

You can download the latest version of the Contacts add-on here.

What we are looking for

Imagine that a website can ask for permission to access your contacts - it could use this information to send messages to your contacts, or to discover which of your friends are already using the service. What other experiences could be enabled? How could the experience be presented in the browser? How could my friends' and coworkers' experience of the web affect my web experience?

Or imagine a Firefox add-on which allows you to share interesting websites you discovered with your friends by simply selecting them from your Contacts list. The add-on could then determine which is the best way to contact each particular contact on your list and send out emails, tweets or status updates on social networks.

We are interested to hear from you what you would like to use Contacts for - what would be a useful or fun use case for you?

"What are the interesting uses of having a complete list of all your contacts and relationships in your browser, for both local browser applications and services on the web?"

How it works

To participate in this Design Challenge you need to create a short video explaining your idea(s), presenting the mockup and showing how your idea works. Your video can contain anything from a napkin drawing, a wireframe, to a polished graphic/prototype. Please note that your video should not be longer than 3 minutes.

Upload

Upload your video to a website such as Vimeo, YouTube or Flickr, tag it with "mozconcept" and fill out the submission form (don't forget to add a short description of your concept) to register your submission. (To facilitate the free exchange of ideas, all content and contributions will be licensed under appropriate open source licenses)

Discuss

During the Design Challenge you can discuss your ideas with fellow designers on the Mozilla Labs Concept Series forum.

All submissions will be presented on this website and honors for "Best in Class" in the categories Innovation, Execution, Interaction, Producible plus a People's Choice Award will be bestowed.