Firefox Mobile Design Session: In-page Find
This is the second installment in the ongoing experiment to open the face-to-face design meetings we have at Mozilla. This design meeting centered around in-page find for Fennec (Firefox Mobile). This feature is as invaluable tool on the desktop, letting you home in quickly on the information you’re looking for once a search engine has got you to the right page. It’s incremental nature means you never have to type a key more than you need. Conspicuously missing from mobile Safari, incremental in-page find on mobile may prove to be even more of a killer feature than on it’s desktop counterpart.
We’ve tried to learn from the feedback to the last video (which, at the time of writing, has almost 350 views!—I was expected a number that could be counted on two hands). We changed the format of our white-boarding to be more like slides: Each board contains a title with its purpose, and has more focused content.
Video is a low information density medium, so for this video we are trying Viddler which allows viewers to make in-line comments to increase its time-information density. The hope is that you guys can annotate, call out interesting sections, or providing feedback on ideas discussed. (Thanks to Patrick and Ian for suggesting this change).
Also, feel free to comment on particular design decisions, or give your own, in the comments here. My favorite feature to come out of this session was the idea of pre-filling your in-page find with the search term, if you had just come from a search engine. When looking for a particular piece of information, the work flow is often (1) search engine the term to get to a potential page, (2) in-page find for the same term to see if the information exists. By defaulting to the search term, it halves the amount of typing (more if you have to check multiple pages), without burdening the user if the guess is wrong.
Here’s the video:
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