More than 40 students from all around the world participated in our inaugural Design Challenge and proposed solutions to the question "What would a browser look like if the Web was all there was? No windows, no unnecessary trappings. Just the Web." The students first submitted a mockup & description of their idea, then went through a three week long tutoring & mentoring phase and afterwards submitted prototypes of their concepts.
Out of the 18 submitted prototypes a panel, including Jeroen van Geel and Steve Baty (both of Johnny Holland), Myk Melez, Jono DiCarlo and Atul Varma of Mozilla Labs, selected four "Best in Class" honors.
My idea is about imagining new possibilities for displaying tabs and bookmarks and thinking beyond whatever technical limitations exist at the moment. I wanted to find a way that allows users to fully benefit from the power of their workspaces. A workspace allows users to save their tabs in task/topic based contexts, that can be organized and named (e.g. "Mozilla" space).
Workspaces are visualized in an isometric perspective, offering a general view of the user's activity and showing aspects like "Flow View", "Domain View", "Semantic View", etc. For example the "Flow view" presents the user's path to the saved tabs in an hierarchical relationship.
You can read more about the original idea and its arguments on my blog.
Prototype | Original Submission
Ecaterina Valica is from Iasi, Romania, She's a master student in Software Engineering at the Faculty of Computer Science, "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" University. Ecaterina also has a particular interest in Web Design, Information Visualization and Human-Computer Interaction Theory. You can find more information about her and her projects on her website.
The project is to have a browser as a media center. We should have the choice between browsing the web, reading mails, chatting or doing something else with a new kind of add-ons (e.g.: an add-on to listen and organize music from different web sites).
For the “web browser” part which is the prototype, there are some new functions:
Prototype | Original Submission
Amine Zafri is from Morocco. He is sixteen and studying in high school. Interested in technology since he was young, he started using design tools when he was nine and programming when he was fourteen. Last year Amine founded www.Libdez.com, a web site about free design resources and he is onto some future web site projects. When he isn’t designing or programming, Amine likes to read IT news and articles.
It's pretty normal for a webpage to exceed the boundaries of the screen, and we've become accustomed to use scrollbars to see more of a page. But what if there were no scrollbars? What would the user need to be able to view a document that does not fit the screen?
While viewing a document the user creates a map in his head to help him navigate, to reinforce this the scrollbar should contain a smaller version of the document. This preview should be an abstraction of the page that highlights special markup to create a more useful representation. Additionally scroll indicators (shadows in the direction of additional content) could show that the document is larger than the screen. This concept was created with multitouch input in mind but could be easily adapted to a mouse/keyboard setting.
Prototype | Original Submission
Valentin Laube fell in love with the web when he first discovered it at his fathers office and never turned back. He has been a fan of Mozilla and the Open Web from the beginning and when he isn't annoying his friends with web-speak he designs websites to finance his studies in Interaction Design at the University of Applied Sciences Magdeburg in Germany. Previously he studied Computational Visualistics.
When designing my prototype, I aimed for simplicity, extensibility, and consistency, which I think are essential to the UI of a web browser. Since web browsers have a large user base, or dare I say the largest user base of all desktop applications, it is impossible to design a browser that satisfies the needs of all users.
With this in mind, I've decided to make extensibility the main focus of the user interface, which allows the users to easily customize and add new functionalities to the browser. Furthermore, to prevent the browser from being visually clustered, newly added functionalities are either kept inside the main menu or categorized in the contextual menu. Doing this would also improve consistency so that the users could easily find and explore the features of the browser.
Prototype | Original Submission
Chaowen Tan is a junior at the University of Texas at Austin. When he first got into college, he was an electrical engineering student. But soon after he learned about user experience design and realized how interested he has been in making things easy and fun to use, he changed his major to computer science in order to pursue his passion for user experience design.
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