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]
Once again we teamed up with the wonderful folks at IxDA, a network dedicated to the professional practice of Interaction Design and Johnny Holland, an open collective, talking, sharing and finding answers about all aspects of interaction design. Together we invite the wider community to join us in this challenge, develop concepts and submit them to our sites.
The submission deadline for the Design Challenge has passed, and we are no longer accepting submissions.
For this Design Challenge we are focusing on finding creative solutions to the question: "The Home Tab — What are some interesting uses of a Firefox-hosted start page?"
In the upcoming releases of Firefox, we'll move the Home button to be a "Home tab" instead. We will keep the existing functionality where you can display a web page of your choice — or disable it altogether — but since we're moving this page to live in Firefox instead of on the web, there are some interesting opportunities.
This page will have access to a lot more of the user's information since it never leaves the browser — history, add-ons, bookmarks, and pretty much anything you can see in Firefox at the moment. This opens up a lot of possibilities, and we'd like to see what you can do with this new-found superpower.
Alex Faaborg from Mozilla's Design Team talks about the brief for this challenge:
An explicit non-goal of this challenge is to design something like My Yahoo, iGoogle or similar start pages that let you put widgets/gadgets. This is not because we don't think this use case is valuable, but we're much more interested in what a browser start page can do with full access to the browser. An interesting example is something like the about:me extension, which shows you trends in your browsing habits. Unlike mainstream portals like Yahoo and MSN, the locally hosted Firefox home tab can potentially offer users an experience that is innately personal, and tailored to each user's incredibly unique personalities and interests.
Wireframe:
Mockup:
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.
Templates
To get you started, we produced a couple of templates which you can use to sketch your ideas:
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. 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.
Important Dates
December 2009 - Launch of The Home Tab - Winter '09 Design Challenge
February 14th, 2010 - Submission Deadline
February 15th, 2010 - People's Choice Voting starts
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