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]

[Update] This Design Challenge is now closed. The students from all four participating schools submitted their excellent works -- read all about it on our blog here.

The Brief

For the fall '09 iteration of our Design Challenge we work together with students from universities and schools specializing in User Experience and Human-Computer-Interaction studies around the world to find innovative concepts to the question:

"Browsing History -- How can we make sense of this rich source of data and how do we best present this data to the user?"

Given:

• Save your browsing history and make it easily accessible
• Let the system give good advice in a user-friendly way

Tasks | Phase 1:

• Research what people think, want, do, etc with their browsing history. What do they want - and what do they not want? Why? Try to understand these user needs
• As a result you should collect ALL the research data and make it available for the entire group

Tasks | Phase 2:

• Research the data you collected and try to find patterns. Use these to come up with possible concepts
• Research what possible solutions already exist around us. Both user created solutions as well as solutions in other software (or maybe even physical)
• As a result each group presents their ideas to the panel – which will give feedback

Tasks | Phase 3:

• With the concept and the feedback the groups have to continue. They now start creating mockups/prototypes of one concept each
• The groups test the prototype with actual users. They use this data to improve their concept
• They make a presentation of their end result. Preferably a video

Students will work together in teams with each university deploying a different solution approach -- from a semester-long integration of the Design Challenge into the course to shorter Design Sprints and high-energy 24 hour Design Jams.

The program will run over a course of 10 weeks and we will report back regularly not only results but also observations from the solution process under the different settings. We will make the results and observations fully open to the wider community, using open licenses as a basis, and want to initiate a dialog between the wider community, users, professors and students.

How It Works

The program starts in the first week of September and runs for 10 weeks. Participants share their progress, observations and results on their respective blogs, on social media sites such as flickr and YouTube and discuss their findings in the Concept Series forum. We will provide information and links to all relevant resources on this site throughout the program.

If you or your school/university would like to participate, please send us an email to conceptseries@mozilla.com.

UX experts (both from Mozilla and external resources) will provide support and feedback during and after the challenge.

At the end of the Design Challenge we will present the results on this site with additional comments from internal and external experts.

Important Dates

• 1st week of September 2009 - Launch of Design Challenge: Fall '09
• 1st week of November 2009 - Program ends, solutions will be presented on this site

Resources

To get our participants started, here are a couple of recommended resources around the wider topic of "Browsing History":

• Wei Zhou, a Mozilla Labs intern in the summer of '08 produced a prototype for a possible approach to history visualization (plus a lot of background info on how she came up with her solution): http://weizhou.wordpress.com/2008/07/07/prototype/
• Mozilla Wiki on Firefox 3 bookmarking (with links to related research): https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox:2.0_Bookmarks
• Related information about the Places API in Firefox (again with links to related research): https://wiki.mozilla.org/Places
• Related information about the Annotations API in Firefox: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Annotations
• Notes from the current implementation work on browser history in Firefox 3: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Browser_History