This past Thursday, October 16, SI students met for the second of our series of Browser Redesign Jams, hosted by SOCHI and SCSI and sponsored by Mozilla and Sourceforge. Our task for this design jam was to take the user stories created at the first design jam, and build them into mockups and sketches.
We started off with a presentation showing an idea for a personal assistant controlled through gestures and voice, that could also serve as a browser remembering your daily habits. That was enough to get some ideas going, and a large group formed to flesh out this idea.
The second group looked at browser history. Realizing that it's often time-consuming to open the full-fledged history page, this group proposed that the location bar in Firefox (also known as the "awesome bar") should include small screenshots of each page. The screenshot for an individual item also should enlarge when the item is moused over. This way, the user can find pages that they had previously visited with ease, even if they only remember a bit about how the page looks.
The third group looked at how to keep track of which tabs had been opened, and where they had opened from. Their idea involved using a hierarchical network diagram to illustrate how the user has opened and used tabs. It can also indicate which tabs were open for the longest, how recently they were viewed, and other useful statistics.
Thanks to everyone who attended, and we're looking forward to seeing you at our final design jam!
