Not having tested it (but liking the design idea):

* Will tabbing into the content area make the list (and the feed provided goodies) keyboard accessible? Requiring a mouse wouldn’t seem right.

* Will moving the mouse away from the list return the display to the “Shield”? Or how else can I quickly return to a (mostly) privacy insensitive state?

* Is it intentional that the current “Shield” design doesn’t contain as many icons as the corresponding list does? If so, isn’t it supposed to be a subtle clue about what you’ll get when mousing towards it?

And the one feature I’m missing from Chrome: Can the new tab page be easily configured to display the first few bookmarks from my personal toolbar instead of the most visited sites from history (those are my to-do-list: where I plan to go soon, not where I’ve already been).

The iteration here is great, but I think it’s important to point out that it was based on:

– feedback from people leaving comments here, talking about it in hallways and on IRC, etc
– a few designers working through those problems to come up with solutions, proposing ideas, convincing each other, modifying throughout
– some insights which led Alex to come to idea of some form of “cognitive shield”
– then a bunch of iterations on what such a shield would look like
– then some quick coding work from Ed to go from whiteboard mockup to prototype

The process here was awesome.

I’ve been following this iteration process and it seems like you’re burning 90% of your time on the last 10% of the work. Maybe you should just pick something and move on.

I second Dmitry: I could not imagine what was the rationale of this shield idea until I read now this blog post.

Maybe if instead of changing the shield to a list you would be changing it to a circular menu by a visible enlarging process, it would be easier to understand what is happening with these items. I don’t know whether it is a good idea or not, but maybe worth a try.

I had the same reaction as Dmitry: the shield attracted me, so I started to move the pointer over to it, whereupon it transformed into the list, surprising me. So I reloaded the page and tried to race the transformation, moving the mouse over fast enough to hit the shield and press one of its buttons before it faded away. But I could never get there fast enough. I did that about half a dozen times before giving up in frustration.

It wasn’t obvious to me that the shield represented the same information as the list and that the goal of the shield was to attract me to the list.

That said, the shield still appeals to me. It feels both easier to ignore when I don’t want to interact with it and more attractive when I see it. But I suspect it would be better to let the user access the content represented by the shield through the shield itself rather than taking the shield away as the user moves towards it.

Great to see the iteration here, but the shield isn’t feeling right to me, and I’m trying to put my finger on why. I think it comes down to the RSS aspect of the frequent sites page.

The last iteration, dropping the thumbnails and giving me finer grained control over the site list, was a revelation. My weather site is pushing weather details there, planet.mozilla is showing me the last several articles. It felt *good* to have the browser smartly anticipating my needs there.

In this iteration though, I don’t have any of that at a glance, and having to new-tab-then-mouse feels halting when I use the keyboard, and sort of unnecessary when I use the mouse, since the circle disappears instantly.

I also found it surprising, as Myk reports above, that I couldn’t use the shield as a set of targets for launching things. “Yes, I want to go to flickr — hey! Where’d it go?”

I get the idea of avoiding distraction though, and I’m not resisting the approach, just reflecting on the experience here. I do wonder if I would find the transition less jarring if the circle animatedly “unwound” itself into the list format? That might help me target better too, since I can see the movement and anticipate the final position for a ballistic mouse move.

Just some thoughts, I really do enjoy the iteration happening here.

Aza, thanks for the great post on the thought process. I have to say, though, that I agree with the Dmitry-Myk-Johnathan thread here, that I was immediately tempted to click on the icons.

I personally was really loving having the list of recently visited sites immediately displayed on the right in that gray column fashion… perhaps just display it at first with a very low opacity and/or blur, in lieu of the shield?

Hi Aza, I liked the article and concept. However, when I downloaded and am trying to get to the cognitive shield, I don’t find it. We should make it pretty easy for users to locate and use it. May be a menu option to turn it on with more opacity. Considering that I am a savvy computer user and still find it quite abstract, more general users would find it even more abstract. Great idea nevertheless.

I personally don’t like the fact that the shield – and whatever form, circle or desaturation – is lifted even if the mouse accidentally hovers over some of the enormous whitespace of the new tab. It would be better if that only happened in closer proximity to the actual menu.

fourthing or fifthing the comments about the shield. As Dmitry and Myk and Johnathan mentioned, my initial reaction was, “ooh! circley!” and then “it was here a second ago, where’d it go?”

I really like the information down the side as Johnathan says. It gives you some ambient information and presents a list of recent locations. I’m not sure it remembers my choices in terms of where I place things in that list or if I remove them though. The ordering seems to reset every time I visit one of those sites.

What about including bookmarks in some form? The bookmarks toolbar takes up unnecessary space, imo. Being able to point at a Places folder and say, “put this on my new tab screen” would be pretty ace.

I copied over my places.sqlite from my usual profile into the test profile and now the sites are listing as they should.

However, I see another problem. There is a * (star) in the lower left corner. Clicking this seems to ‘toggle’ off the listing of sites, however when opening a new tab the location bar has ‘focus’ but this string is also there:

chrome://abouttab/content/tab.html

This messes navigation if I know what site I want to visit, as its ‘appended’ onto the string above, and of course navigation fails in ‘Site not found’.

Shouldn’t it just be like now, a ‘blank-tab’ with the cursor in the Location-bar ?

Sorry if this has already been mentioned.

aka
Littlemutt

Oh, now I saw your comment Aza. Good idea!

BTW, the font you’ve chosen in the “Undo bar” for the web page title is not very readable and a bit too small if you ask me. (I have ClearType enabled, if that makes a difference.)

I’d suggest making it the same size as “You recently closed the tab”, make it *not* capitalized but bold instead.

Some major problems with the dots iteration were:

1) People expected it to be a target (it kind of looked like a target)
2) There wasn’t a good mapping between the shield (used to keep you focused), and the information that appeared
3) The display activated too easily, hit control-t and then moved the mouse to give the location bar the focus (even though it already had it), or moused into the new tab as the next page was loading, it triggered even though you didn’t want to view the list.

Here is a new iteration that solves those three problems while still maintaining what I think is good about the design:

http://people.mozilla.com/~faaborg/files/20090324-notificationsAndFlow/shieldi2.png

I also have a post up about the objectives of not showing the user compelling information that is unrelated to their current task, unless they directly ask for it:

http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2009/03/24/notifications-and-flow/

Aza and Alex – I just asked my wife (who is a typical Firefox user and non-technical) what she thought the new tab page should be. Here’s what she said:

1) She is forced to have her homepage statically set (for work), so she thought maybe give her options for a secondary or even a third homepage that could be executed during Firefox start or access those secondary homepages through the new tab UI. Basically she’d love to have easy access to other pages besides her work homepage.

2) She thinks frequent sites are useful, but also most recent sites should be included in the UI somehow. For example, if you’re working on a project or doing some research and you have to come back to it later, you can open a new tab and there will be the last 3 or 4 sites you were visiting.

3) She agreed that a blank new tab page is 100% not useful :)

4) She wanted the new tab page to be easy to understand and quick.

Hope that helps. I might ask some other non-technical users what they think and put that on here as well.

-Matt

How about a a nice large watermarked firefox logo in the middle of the screen? It should fade into a list when you move the mouse *over it*, otherwise it should just sit there quietly.

I know it’s not as “designy” as your congitive shield, but a big watermarked logo does not hold the “promise” of interaction as much as your (very visually appealing) 8-icon shield. Its circles look too clickable, and people will invariably attempt to click on them.

I think laura is on point. When you open a tab in the middle of doing something, it usually pertains to what is going on, right now… Maybe your going to look something up at another site because its a ‘reference’ to the current tab. This makes sense because right now my tabs are (in order) “Tabs :: Firefox extensions” “Mozdev.org” “A google search for putting ‘history’ in a blank tab” and finally this one. Clearly im looking to make a blank tab one that’s history… or put my history in a tab. But that doesn’t matter — what matters is if i open a new tab… i don’t probably want to go to facebook.

It might be a better idea to try and PREDICT what I’m going to do. You can try predictions based on time of day (I’m on face book at this 8pm) or by immediate events (recently i used google at least 3 times) or possibly by objective or target — all my current tabs deal with — Tabs, History, Blank tabs.

In my mind, history is an under utilized function. So a new tab, should focus on history and probably 2 types of it: the immediate history (based on the “back button”), and the long term history.

Maybe if instead of changing the shield to a list you would be changing it to a circular menu by a visible enlarging process, it would be easier to understand what is happening with these items. I don’t know whether it is a good idea or not, but maybe worth a try.

The idea with icon circle which fades and becomes replaced by a list of sites is not a good one imho. The user tries to focus mouse pointer on that circle believing it’s some kind of action menu and then on the half-way to the target, the circle disappears instantly and a list appears in it’s place. The user loses his initial target and gets confused by a new one, differently arranged set of targets.

This iteration focuses on solving that paradox by proposing a solution that we’ve dubbed “the cognitive shield” (coined by Alex Faaborg).

Not entirely what your article is about, but i think you should go the enzo humanized route with ubiquity and remove it from the browser.

Nice!! I hope you will keep up the amazing work.

Maybe fans of Atlas Shrugged? If any actually have the capital to take on such an operation, that is….|

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