Tune in to design at Mozilla

March 9, 2010
Posted by beltzner

Tune in to design at Mozilla

The best designers in the world all have one thing in common – a really full trash basket.

Design takes time, patience and iteration. It takes sketching the same ideas out over and over again on a whiteboard, figuring out which bits work and which bits just seemed like good ideas at the time. It takes staring at other people’s ideas and jealously wishing that you’d thought of that, too, and wondering what bits you can take as inspiration without people accusing you of not being original. It takes many soul searching evenings of figuring out if being original is really the right goal.

Sharing those sketches can be hard to do, and often it’s done only in the context of the finished product. In the past when we’ve tried to share early sketches at Mozilla, the enthusiastic (yet often awfully harsh) feedback of the community ends up ending design explorations before they really get started. The result is that designers have waited until more fully fleshed out mockups and designs can be shared, but this comes at the cost of not being as transparent as we feel we should be, and not including our community in our design discussions.

So those of us working on User Experience at Mozilla are going to try something new: a virtual idea journal and sketchbook, which we’ve tentatively called “From the Bikeshed” (as you may imagine, picking a name proved tricky!) It’s a Tumblr microblog doohickey thinger that we’ll all be posting to throughout the days and weeks to come. It’s only been active for a few hours, and we’ve already started really filling it up.

The astute will quickly notice some things:

It’s really random. There’s really no rules to what type of content will get posted here. We’re sharing sketches, whiteboard diagrams, iterations of high fidelity mockups, half formed ideas, articles that we found interesting and relevant, even images or photographs that inspired us.
There is little context being offered. This is intentional. When we have more context to give, we’ll write a blog post, but for now, this is our design stream of consciousness. When we’re done with a meeting or sketching out something cool, we’ll post it right away without cleaning it up.
There is no place to leave comments. This is less intentional, but while we figure out how to enable comments on Tumblr, we’re also going to think about what sort of comments we want to enable. As always, people should feel free to give us feedback in the dev-usability group.
Some of the stuff has nothing to do with Mozilla. Yup, and that’s healthy. The best ideas often come from thinking about how to apply other solutions to your problems, so we often go around looking at other problems in order to figure out how to solve our own.

So far it’s been really freeing and enjoyable for us all to start sharing this stuff with you, and hopefully you like it, too. Thanks to Alex Limi for setting up the Tumblr and getting us rolling.

7 Comments

Posted Under mozilla

Mossop
March 9, 2010

Awesome, much <3. Can you include an author for the posts so if people want to discuss things they know who to find on IRC?

Mitch
March 9, 2010

From the Bikeshed – LOL, awesome name.

Marco
March 9, 2010

That’s really neat! I love looking at design concepts. Re: Comments, I’m a fan of Win7 Taskforce’s model: Vote up-and-down, with an area for little comments. Don’t know if that fits a “design stream” like the tumblr, but I like a little, lesser-impact model such as that.

Tristan
March 9, 2010

I like it. A lot!

Someone on the UX Team :)
March 9, 2010

>Awesome, much an author for the posts so if people
>want to discuss things they know who
>to find on IRC?

There might be some value in being able to throw an idea out there without immediate attribution. Kind of like how you shouldn’t attack people when brainstorming, this keeps us slightly safer from the big evil internet