Hello Madhava. Can you tell me a little about yourself, and how did
you first got involved in Mozilla.
I'm
Canadian and I live and work in the city of Toronto, where Mozilla has
a small office. My first name is Indian and my last name is Swedish,
by way of Finland. I've been doing interaction and user-experience
design for 10 years, always in the software field. I'd followed the
Mozilla project for some time, trying out nightlies and reading
usability-related bugs, for a while before starting to work for Mozilla
in 2007, when I worked on the design of Firefox 3, especially the "Get
Add-ons" section of the Add-ons Manager.
What's your current role in Mozilla and what are your main tasks?
My
title at Mozilla is "Designer at Small," which is a little play on
words, given that one of the major considerations in designing for
mobile is that the devices are so small. My role, though, is that of
user-experience lead for mobile. I spend my time thinking about how
the use of a browser is different when people are mobile, and and
designing Firefox's mobile user interface to take these differences
into account.
Can you tell me what are the main UI goals in Firefox Mobile?
This
is my favorite topic, so I've got a long answer for you! We wanted to
bring the full Firefox experience -- that of a complete modern
web-browser -- to mobile devices. The user-iterface that was designed
for the desktop, though, is clearly not appropriate for a device that
will fit in your pocket! On top of this, not only are mobile devices from the
computers they use at their desks, but people themselves are also
different when they're mobile. Because of this, the three biggest
goals for the UI were these:
1. It's about the
webpage. There's no control in the browser UI that people spend as
much time with as content itself. Firefox tries to be minimal in it's
UI even on the desktop, but on the small screens of mobile it's a
strict requirement. To do this we cut back on the number of primary
controls and also get them out of the way when you don't need them.
The titlebar scrolls of the top as you begin to use a page, and tabs
and controls like back and forward are placed just past the page edges
where you can pull them in if you need them.
2.
Minimize typing. Typing is difficult even on the best of phone
keyboards, so Firefox tries to offer suggestions for what you might
want everywhere possible. The best example of this is the
mobile-adapted version of the Firefox "Awesomebar" or Smart Location
Bar. Before you even begin to type a webpage title or URL, Firefox
makes suggestions based on your own browsing history and bookmarks so
that you can just tap on what you want. Other Firefox features, like
the password manager, also help minimize typing.
3.
Focus on mobile needs. We'll all be discovering about how people's
browsing differs when they're mobile over the next few years, but
already we know that people do a lot more quick searches for
information that they need for whatever they're doing at the moment in
the real world. For example, looking up an address or phone number, or
getting an answer to a trivia question from Wikipedia. To support
this, we've designed in quick searching buttons for a number of common
search engines (and it's fully customizable) so that you can just type
what you're looking for into Firefox, and do the search immediately.
Other Firefox like features like location-aware browsing are
particularly helpful while mobile.
Why would you, as a end-user, choose Firefox Mobile.
For
me, the biggest reason is how quickly you get to the website you want
with the awesomebar. When typing is difficult, being able to tap on
the site I want, because it's part of "my" part of the web (the places
I go a lot), without typing or just entering one or two letters, is
amazing -- it changes the way you browse. This gets even more powerful
when you add something called Weave Sync (a Mozilla add-on), which lets
you synchronize your bookmarks, history, passwords, and tabs to your
mobile device. Imagine having the browser on your phone instantly be
as "worn-in" to the way you browse as the browser you've been training
for years on your desktop computer.
That's one
thing that makes for a particularly good user-experience among many,
though, like having a browser that can render the whole web, an
interface that gets out of your way when you don't need it, and being
able to install add-ons.
Would you please describe the magic under the hood that differs
Firefox Mobile from other browsers?
There's
magic in having the same rendering engine and javascript interpreter
that power the latest version of desktop Firefox on your phone, which
means you have the latest web technology everywhere you go. There's
also magic in the algorithm that powers the awesomebar -- it uses
measures of the frequency and recency of sites you've visited, and
applies extra importance to sites that you have bookmarked because
those are sites you are particularly interested in. Using these, the
browser can make very good guesses about where you want to go, and just
offer you something to tap on.
What would you need to improve the most in near future?
There's
a lot of work going on right now to make the browser even faster and
more responsive, which is a bigger challenge on mobile devices than on
powerful desktop computers. Speed is very important, and this is
something that all mobile browsers are working on. We are also trying
to get Firefox onto more other mobile platforms -- there's an alpha
version for Windows Mobile, and there is investigation going on into
making it work on Android.
Do you have any message to current and future users of Firefox
Mobile?
Most
importantly, start using Firefox on your mobile and get involved to
make it more what you need it to be. Whether it's by sending in your
feedback, creating add-ons, or by filing and discussing in bugs,
everyone can help make Firefox into an even better browser for mobiles.