For this Design Challenge we are focusing on finding creative solutions to the question: "Reinventing Tabs in the Browser - How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?"
Tabs worked well on slow machines on a thin Internet, where ten browser sessions were "many browser sessions". Today, 20+ parallel sessions are quite common; the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive. However, if you have more than seven or eight tabs open they become pretty much useless. And tabs don’t work well if you use them with heterogeneous information. They’re a good solution to keep the screen tidy for the moment. And that’s just what they should continue doing.
To get you started, to inspire your thinking and to give you a taster for the thoughts which were already thought on this topic, read Aza Raskin's blog post about "Firefox.next: Tabs on the side?", Oliver Reichenstein's post about "Designing Firefox 3.2" and Michael Mahemoff's post about "Taking Browser Tabs Seriously". Also check out Liz Blankenship, Jakob Hilden and Kerry Kao's work and research on TabViz "Visualizing browser tabs in a useful way" and Alexander Limi's post on "Reinventing Tabs in the Browser".
Also don't miss the "food for thought" articles Johnny Holland publishes throughout the Design Challenge on their site:
To participate in the Design Challenge you need to create a mockup of your proposed solution. A mockup can be anything from a napkin drawing, to a wireframe, to a polished graphic.
You also need to create a video explaining your idea(s), presenting the mockup and showing how your idea works.
To register your entry: Upload your mockup and your video to a website such as Flickr, Vimeo or YouTube and tag it with "mozconcept". Send us an email to conceptseries@mozilla.com with links to both your mockup and your video. (To facilitate the free exchange of ideas, all content and contributions will be licensed under appropriate open source licenses.)
During the Design Challenge you can discuss your ideas with fellow designers on the Mozilla Labs Concept Series forum. To inspire and help you during the challenge, Johnny Holland will post articles with background information on their website throughout the challenge.
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.
If you’re interested in participating, please do join us in the Concept Series discussion forum. Also follow us on Twitter: @mozconcept, @ixda and @johnnyholland.
Help us spread the word! We produced a series of buttons and badges for the Design Challenge as well as special buttons for Design Challenge participants and for your mockup. You find all of them on our special page.
If your school/university is interested in participating, please contact us directly at conceptseries@mozilla.com.
To participate in the 'Design Challenge: Summer 09' you need to produce a mockup and a video explaining your mockup, the ideas behind it and the proposed functionality.
A mockup can be anything from a napkin drawing, wireframes to a beautifully crafted Photoshop graphic. Please upload your mockup on your blog, a photo hosting site like Flickr or your personal website. Submit your mockup in one of the common graphic formats (jpeg, png, etc).
Your video should be short - try to not make it longer than 3 minutes. Upload your video to a video hosting site such as YouTube or Vimeo or host it on your own website in one of the common video formats (Flash, QuickTime). If you upload your video to a video hosting site, make sure you tag it with "mozconcept".
Send us the two links (one to your mockup and one to your video) via email to conceptseries@mozilla.com. Please add a little bit of information about yourself (keep it short - 140 characters is a great length!) and acknowledge that you license your work under a Creative Commons Attribution license by adding the following line to your email:
"This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/)"
Lastly: Try to keep some notes about your process (from ideation to solution) as we would love to present this in a couple of articles at the end of the Design Challenge.
Sure! There's a whole bunch of different ways to do this - but to get you started, here are a couple of examples we like:
+ The Drawing Board: Commuter Buddy
+ Split Screen, Tab-Aware History, Cloud File Dialog
Yes, absolutely! You can participate either as an individual as well as a group of people.
We'll send you a (semi-)automated email when we receive your submission. If you didn't receive this email (please check your spam box as it might be picked up by your spam filter), please ping us either via email or on Twitter.
We've got four categories (plus a People's Choice award for the most popular submission):
+ Best in Class: Innovation (for the solution that has the newest / most original interaction models)
+ Best in Class: Execution (for the solution that has the most expressive prototype, a combination of polish as well as functional availability)
+ Best in Class: Interaction (for the solution that feels provides the best human-computer interaction model)
+ Best in Class: Producible (for the solution that would be the easiest to ship to users immediately)
We have two panelists each from IxDA, Johnny Holland and Mozilla, with the four "Best in Class" honorees from our last Design Challenge submitting one joint vote.
Janna DeVylder (IxDA)
Janna is soon-to-be director of interactive communication at Savannah College of Art & Design. Prior to this she managed a team of interaction designers at Arc Worldwide, designed consumer websites at Giant Step, teacher & student web-based services at McDougal Littell, and travel shopping & planning tools at Orbitz. Janna has taken special interest in how our profession is placed within organizations and in the tools and design processes used to arrive at engaging products & services. Janna started IxDA Chicago and now serves as the President of the IxDA Board of Directors.
Kevin Silver (IxDA)
Kevin is an empathetic champion of the end user and has been involved in designing the behavior of digital products since 1995. He has worked on a diverse range of projects for the government, software companies and many nationally recognized brands providing strategic direction and interaction design goodness. As a passionate advocate for Interaction Design, Kevin led the charge in forming an IxDA local group in New Mexico and is currently on the IxDA Board of Directors. In his role on the IxDA Board, Kevin oversees more than 70 IxDA local groups from around the world. Currently he is UX Designer at Tyler Technologies working to deliver the next generation of software for the public sector.
Jeroen van Geel (Johnny Holland)
Jeroen van Geel is founder and chief kahuna of Johnny Holland. He works as a senior interaction designer at Fabrique Communication & Design and has perfected the art of asking 'Why?'
Steve Baty (Johnny Holland)
Steve Baty solves problems. Usually for businesses; often Government and not-for-profits. He is a User Experience strategist with over a decade of commercial experience, and holds two Masters degrees (eCommerce and MBA) and a Bachelors degree in Mathematics. Steve is an editor of Johnny Holland; and an organizer of the UX Australia conference and UX Book Club.
Alexander Limi (Mozilla)
Alexander Limi makes software easier to use. One of the founders of the open source project Plone, he currently lives in San Francisco, and previously worked at Jarn & Google. These days, he works at Mozilla on the Firefox browser.
Aza Raskin (Mozilla)
Aza gave his first talk on user interface at age 10 and got hooked. At 17, he was talking and consulting internationally; at 19, he coauthored a physics textbook because he was too young to buy alcohol; at 21, he started drinking alcohol and co-founded Humanized. Two years later, Aza founded Songza.com, a minimalist music search engine that had over a million song plays during it's first week of operation. After Humanized was sucked into Mozilla, Aza became Head of User Experience for Mozilla Labs.
Ecaterina Valica, Amine Zafri & Valentin Laube (for Mozilla)
Ecaterina, Amine and Valentin are three of the 'Best in Class' honorees from our Spring 09 Design Challenge. You can find more information about them and their work on our Design Challenge: Spring 09 site.
That's great! Send us a logo of your school and we'll add you to the partner section.
If you need more information, send us an email to conceptseries@mozilla.com.
Our primary point of contact is the Mozilla Labs Concept Series Google Group - please ask your questions here first.
You can further reach us via Twitter: @mozconcept (for Mozilla Labs), @johnnyholland (for Johnny Holland) and @ixda (for IxDA).
And if that all doesn't work for you, send us an email to conceptseries@mozilla.com.
Parsons The New School For Design (USA)
Savannah College of Art and Design (USA)
Student Organization for Computer-Human Interaction (USA)
The University of Sydney (Australia)
PUC Minas (Brazil)
University of the Region of Joinville (Brazil)
School of Visual Arts (USA)
Faber Ludens (Brazil)
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