All posts in Design

Joining Amazon to Talk to Some Robots

By On March 7, 2018 In Communication, Culture, Design, Privacy, Research, Technology, User Experience With Comments Off on Joining Amazon to Talk to Some Robots Permanent Link to Joining Amazon to Talk to Some RobotsPermalink

Alexa holding note that says "I hear you"

On Monday, I’m joining Amazon to work on the experience of Alexa within households.

I’ll be based in Lab126, Amazon’s hardware and R&D base in Sunnyvale, California.

The interaction between humans and technology has always been my core interest, and what that interaction looks like has changed fundamentally in the last few decades. A person using a machine used to be an interaction between two entities: 1. the person 2. the machine she is yelling at. If there were others involved, they were in the world: the coworkers, the system, the factory.

Technology itself is now collaborative, and every person’s use case more tailored to them: my music, my friends, my content. For a household, and even moreso a family, people bring their unique interests but share devices, technology, noise, plans, and daily life.

For a family, technology both isolates and connects. On the isolation end, every family member can have their own tailored experience that they don’t have to share. If you remember flights when a single movie was shown to every passenger, you’re grimacing right now.  Untailored, broad experiences leave nearly everyone unsatisfied.

On the connection end, technology can serve the family’s collective needs by coordinating schedules, providing the right information at the right times, creating opportunities for fun together, and largely getting out of the way. The balance of technology between isolation and connection is a deeply interesting to me.

Having worked at Google for the last few years, I brought a Google Home into our living room before the birth of my daughter. I was initially skeptical of its benefits. However, I found I kept asking Home for things: weather, podcasts, lullabies. Caring for a baby, my hands were usually full and moving. During a diaper change, the difficulty of four taps on a smartphone mirrors that of launching a car into space.

Now my baby is a toddler, and she is starting to have her own desires. She wants to listen to this and watch that. She can’t yet use technology, so I’m the middleman for her access to content. That will change. She’ll grow up with smart assistants, and she’ll learn that they serve her, too. The battle over the remote becomes the battle over the smart assistant. Rather than a surveillance system, kids need the independence to learn, experiment, test boundaries, and screw up. What does that look like with smart assistants? Who does Alexa serve? Will Alexa keep my daughter’s secrets? Will she keep mine? How will she handle negotiations over music, temperature, food, and information? She can’t easily live with us and stay neutral.

These questions surrounding smart assistants meaningfully shift family dynamics. Right now, I’m embracing my ignorance on families. Each family and culture has different expectations regarding technology’s role in the home. Luckily for me, Amazon has fantastic researchers, and I plan to annoy the hell out of them.

Onto New Challenges

By On February 7, 2016 In Android, Communication Team, Design, Google, Project Fi, Technology, User Experience With Comments Off on Onto New Challenges Permanent Link to Onto New ChallengesPermalink
Reddit Burning Man Meetup 2015. Photo by /u/umdmatto

Reddit Burning Man Meetup 2015. I’m at top right wearing horns. Photo by /u/umdmatto

After a wild and wonderful time at Reddit, I’ve decided to move on.

And when I say wild, I mean it. The past year has been the most tumultuous in Reddit’s history. I joined the week of the Celebrity Photo hacking scandal (aka The Fappening) and stayed through two CEO changes, user uprisings, a moderator-driven Reddit blackout, and enough drama to run the Eastern seaboard dry of popcorn.

That’s the bad.

The good was, simply, amazing. I worked with some of the most talented, kind, creative people I’ve ever met. People like Josh, who thought up and implemented The Button, the internet’s most devastatingly crafty April Fool’s day prank. And, people like Heath, who couldn’t imagine why shipping boxes couldn’t be colorful origami cat homes.

We also didn’t let the turmoil stop us from getting stuff done. I’m thrilled to have shipped features such as responsive mobile web, embedded comments, improved mod tools, and better mechanisms for combating online harassment and abuse. Most fun was designing Reddit’s first Android app, which is now in beta and launching to everyone soon!

What’s Next

Tomorrow, I start at Google as Lead UX designer on Project Fi, working out of the San Francisco office. Fi is a tremendously exciting initiative that offers an alternative to the traditional model of cell phone network plans. Right now, the average American is paying a single cell phone company over $100 a month for service limited to that company’s coverage. It sucks, but you have no other option, right? Fi’s another option. For a Fi plan starting at $20 a month, your phone will invisibly switch among Wi-Fi and cell carriers to whatever connection is fastest at your current location.

Google Fi Box

Project Fi is still fairly new. It’s only available on a few devices in an Early Access Program for now, but I’m excited to see how we can build and grow it. Newer projects carry more risk and more potential, which are characteristics of the challenges most fun to tackle. I can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings.

reddit Stands with Charlie Hebdo

By On January 7, 2015 In Design, Freedom of speech, internet, Politics, Reddit With 1 Comment Permanent Link to reddit Stands with Charlie HebdoPermalink

We’ve changed our alien Snoo logo today to show solidarity with those who support freedom of speech and condemn violence.

alien snoo logo holding je suis charlie sign from reddit.com

Bigger version:

Five Things I’ve Learned About redditors (so far)

By On November 2, 2014 In Communication, Community, Culture, data, Design, internet, Reddit, Research, Studies, Surveys, Technology, usability, User Experience, User Testing With 1 Comment Permanent Link to Five Things I’ve Learned About redditors (so far)Permalink

This is my reddit avatar. All employees get one
About a month ago, I took a gig to design the user experience of reddit. It’s a pretty exciting challenge!  My first projects have been mostly on mobile, and they’ve been a blast.  Check out our recently released AMA app on iTunes and Android and recently acquired Alien Blue iOS app.

The first step towards better user experience is better understanding of the users, so the quest begins with understanding redditors. And, there’s a lot of them: 6% of all online adults! ((Pew Research: 6% of Online Adults are reddit Users)) Understanding so many people requires attacking the problem at multiple angles.

One of the most direct ways to learn about a large user population is through surveys. The benefit of surveys is that they can be deployed broadly and analyzed statistically.  The main drawback is that they skew results towards the users who choose to complete them.

A few weeks ago, I released a test survey the subreddit ((subreddit: a sub-communities within reddit focused on a specific topic)) called /r/samplesize, which is dedicated to posting and taking surveys for other redditors.  I received 226 responses. Bearing in mind the enormous grain of salt that these results are comprised entirely of self-selecting users, here’s what I learned:

1. Twice as many men responded to the survey than women.

While I don’t know how representative this ratio is of reddit as a whole, this is already far more gender-balanced than previous self-selected surveys from three years ago. ((Who in the World is reddit? Results are in…)) ((I made a basic Reddit Demographic Survey. Let’s find out who we are…))

2. Most active users have been redditors for 1-3 years.

This isn’t too surprising considering the survey was given to a subreddit that only longer-term users would be aware of. However, given the site’s high bounce rate, it’s likely that reddit could improve at welcoming and retaining newer users.  After all, if reddit can’t create core users at a rate at or above dropout (churn) rate, its population will gradually decline.

3. Reading favorite subreddits is redditors’ most valued activity.

I asked users to rank their activities on reddit from not very important to extremely important: here are the responses only for extremely important.  As you can see, reading favorite subreddits was by far most commonly marked as extremely important.  User’s front pages was the second most marked as extremely important, which isn’t surprising since 99.2% of survey respondents have accounts which they use to modify their front page.

4. Users primarily want reddit to entertain them. Their secondary expectation is for community.

Here, I asked “what do you expect of reddit?” with a freeform response.  The tallies are per response rather than per user, such that if a user said she expected “community and humor,” I’d give one tally to community and another to humor.

Wanting reddit to be entertaining isn’t surprising: it’s the front page of the internet, after all.  What’s particularly interesting is how often community and communication were cited as expectations.  Discussion, particularly through comments, was the second most frequently cited expectation.  What’s reflected in “free speech,” “openness,” and “local content” were mainly variations on the idea that reddit content is different primarily because of its community.  Of these, about half of the responses mentioned the value of varied perspective – that reddit provided content and stories that users might otherwise not have found (or answers to questions they were afraid to ask).

5. What frustrates redditors most are other redditors.

For this freeform question, I simply asked redditors what frustrates them about reddit. The majority of responses could be summarized by concern that reddit is or is becoming dominated by negative viewpoints. Most common were concerns that homophobia, racism, and/or misogyny were unduly influencing the community. Second most common were concerns that reddit culture was becoming homogenized. Words such as “hivemind,” “groupthink,” and “in-jokes” appeared frequently. The most common frustration not related to the community was that the site itself was ugly and/or poorly designed.

It’s fascinating to get some insight into how these longterm users think about reddit and its future.  The challenge from here will be to learn more about the people who may not self-select to take a survey: newer users, non-users, and the population of reddit overall.  We’re planning user tests now to learn about newer redditors, and in-person interviews can help give more in-depth data on behavior.  But we’ll continue using surveys too: here’s the next if you’d like to take one!

Looking Ahead: Challenges for the Open Web

By On July 28, 2014 In Communication, Community, Culture, Design, Firefox, internet, Mozilla, Open Source, Privacy, Security, Technologies, Technology, User Experience With 2 Comments Permanent Link to Looking Ahead: Challenges for the Open WebPermalink

Mozilla at the 2008 Summit in Whistler. Mozilla Community at 2008 Summit. Taken by Gen Kanai

At the end of this week, I’m moving on after six amazing years at Mozilla. On August 25, I’ll be joining Reddit – another global open source project – as their first user experience designer. I’m ecstatic to help shape and design the future of another incredible community.

In looking back at all that’s changed in technology and the web since I joined Mozilla, I find myself humbled at the trials we’ve met and overcome. When I joined in 2008, we were smaller and scrappier. Fellow designer Alex Faaborg and myself stood before whiteboards, explaining how tabs on top of the URL bar were more efficient. The bug backlogs of Firefox 3 kept us up at night, but when we launched in July 2008 we made the Guinness Book of World Records for most software downloads in 24 hours ((Mozilla sets new Guinness World Record with Firefox 3 downloads)). Chrome didn’t even exist yet!

Of the challenges in Mozilla’s future, many are nearly universal for open source communities and largely unsolved. Here are three I find myself often returning to:

1. How do we protect users’ data when users consistently choose utility over privacy?

You can package it any way you like, but if your privacy-centric product even slightly hinders user enjoyment of the web, it won’t see wide adoption.

When prompted, users overwhelming cite online privacy (referring to data being shared with companies and governments) as a concern. A recent poll ((Right To Be Forgotten: Do Users Even Care?)) showed 26% of people were “extremely concerned” about privacy when using a search engine, with nearly 90% expressing some level of concern. And yet, 92% of those use Google and only 3% use DuckDuckGo, an explicitly non-tracking search engine. In the developing world and younger markets, users are even less concerned. Mozilla’s research team is currently investigating attitudes towards privacy in Malaysia and the Philippines, and most people they’ve spoken with don’t even have a concept “online privacy” aside from not wanting their friends and relatives to see all they’ve posted to social media.

Those of us who care about online privacy are increasingly at a values impasse with our users. The solution is not to simply inform, coax, or frighten users into taking security measures.

Most importantly, a world without the practical technological possibility of privacy is much scarier than one where users can choose, either actively or passively, to share their information.

2. How can global communities accommodate incompatible values?

Philipp asks if this is good for the company

Championing inclusiveness and diversity is an easy decision for most organizations. But when push comes to shove, members of any large community will still disagree fundamentally on many important values. The need to bridge fundamental divides is an inevitability.

As an example, open source contributors disagree vehemently when it comes to DRM. Is it better to follow the content industry and implement extensions so content owners can control how users share content? Or, is DRM’s current instantiation so harmful to an open web that it’s worth limiting user’s access to content to avoid supporting it? Both these views and many others exist amongst Mozilla contributors, yet ultimately decisions about what ships in Firefox must be made. When this happens, the community cannot simply shrink by the number of people opposed to the decision.

To successfully cooperate, global communities have to form a sustainable plurality. The key is allowing members to operate in a context of known responsibilities to each other, yet also generalized freedom to hold, express, and act on their views. Freedom of expression should exist by default, but the community will collapse if members don’t understand that they also have responsibilities that are defined and understood.

Furthermore, the balance of power between the community at large and its leadership is best when it is understood and predictable. Major organizational decisions are often be made by a few executives or benevolent dictators for life. Where and how these decisions are made as well as what was decided needs to be widely available for a community to cohere. The community must also know the difference between the organizational values which guide decisions and the personal values of leaders which do not. Realistically, the two are never wholly separate.

The question over “public vs. private” values in leadership has been addressed frequently at Mozilla. Perhaps the lines that separate public and private views cannot be entirely explicit, but acknowledging and engaging openly about differences bring strength to a community. Again, this is best where the role and position of leaders in making decisions is clear.

3. How can design culture embrace open source?

Affinity Diagramming with Firefox in Toronto

Within design communities, open source is still met with disinterest at best and derision at worst. This is hurting both open source and design.

The main barrier towards design culture embracing open source is a chicken-and-egg: few open source projects appear to value usability and design. Scratch-your-own-itch hacker culture assumes the creators of technology are its users, which deemphasizes the need for usability and accessibility. Additionally, feedback in open-source is heard mainly from a few power-users, and the temptation to appease them can thwart designs that would appeal to a wider audience.

Another reason design culture hasn’t embraced open source stems from designers’ wariness over being taken advantage of. I remember Mark Mentzer, one of my Carnegie Mellon design professors, warning his students to “never work for free!” This attitude runs deep in design circles, and for good reason: we’ve become used to requests for work where the only payment will be “another piece in your portfolio.” Honoring those requests devalues design work as a whole.

But, open source is different from free labor. Just as developers do, designers love their work and often consider it a hobby as well as an occupation. The transformative potential of open source projects excites designers as much as developers. By insisting on excellent user experience, open source projects can show designers that they are communities that value design.

Another reason design culture hasn’t embraced open source is because code contributions fit more easily into open projects than design contributions. Any developer can jump into an open source project by taking and fixing a bug. Little context is needed beyond what’s provided in the ticket: current behavior, expected behavior, acceptance criteria. Patch written, reviewed, done, boom.

In design, more context and background is needed to “fix a problem,” which hinders potential community contributions. A design “bug” is harder to identify than most engineering bugs. Simply diagnosing them requires user research, collaboration, and context. Providing well-scoped design problems with dedicated mentors can help bring on contributors.


Mozilla Heart

To Mozilla, thank you for six amazing years. You’re my allies, my friends, and the most incredible people I know.

Try Out Fira Sans: a Free, Open Source Typeface Commissioned by Mozilla

By On May 23, 2014 In Design, Mozilla, Open Source, Typography With 39 Comments Permanent Link to Try Out Fira Sans: a Free, Open Source Typeface Commissioned by MozillaPermalink

As designers in open source, we’re constantly looking for opportunities to bring the principles of universal access and redistribution to new areas. While the term “open source” may still be mainly associated with code, the value in free collaboration benefits every discipline – particularly design.

In that spirit, the Mozilla Foundation commissioned famed typographer Erik Spiekermann to create a completely free, open-source typeface in 2013. Thus was born Fira Sans, a gorgeous san-serif font that looks great on the web. So great, in fact, that we’ll be using it in Firefox’s in-content pages such as Preferences and the Add-ons Manager.

fira sans preview

If you haven’t tried out Fira Sans, now’s a great time: version 3.1 introduces 16 different weights, a huge character map, and extensive language support. Also available is Fira Mono, a monospaced version of the original. Give it a spin on your next project!

Download Fira Sans 3.105 (3.6mb .zip)

Firefox’s Redesigned Preferences Feel More like the Web

By On May 20, 2014 In Customization, Design, Features, Firefox, Mozilla, Preferences, usability, User Experience With 41 Comments Permanent Link to Firefox’s Redesigned Preferences Feel More like the WebPermalink

Another great Firefox improvement is releasing soon!

Firefox’s Preferences, until now, have required navigation through a cumbersome floating window where it’s nearly impossible to find what you’re looking for. This window is a classic example of a common software problem: settings are slowly added onto the interface as new functionality is introduced, and eventually it sags under the weight.

The mess that is current Firefox Preferences

The mess that is current Firefox Preferences

Until now, that is!

The Firefox UX team is excited to announce that brand new, beautiful Preferences are now the default in Firefox nightlies and will soon be in release Firefox. In this redesign, the interface is visually consistent, the information architecture is improved, and the whole thing is rendered in content space rather than as a separate window.

Firefox’s new in-content preferences

Why is it important that Preferences are in the content space rather than a separate window?

  1. Consistency across devices. By using the content space, we no longer have to rely on the ability of a device to draw separate windows and dialogs. This is particularly important on tablets and phones, where window management is more difficult. Now, users of mobile Firefox will see a familiar interface when move to desktop Firefox, and vice versa.
  2. Consistency across operating systems. Windows, OSX, and Linux all create windows and dialogs differently, which means the user’s experience with Preferences was different depending on the OS. Now, as we draw this interface within Firefox, we can make it look and feel identical across systems.
  3. Consistency with the web. Ultimately, the browser is a doorway to the rest of the web. For the browser to behave like a dialog-heavy desktop application rather than the web itself was jarringly anachronistic. Beneficially, rendering like a website also means users won’t need to find and manage a separate window in addition to their open tabs.
  4. Space to grow. Not being bounded by a small, floating window means we can create richer customization experiences. The Add-ons manager has already  moved to content space, and we’ve been able to explore richer use cases as a result. Similarly, expect to see innovative customization experiments as well as the usual Firefox settings.

And before you ask, yes, the next step is absolutely a search field in Preferences to summon the exact setting you’re looking for. This is needed particularly so users won’t have to “learn” our interface, but can instead focus on their task.

A special thank you goes to Senior Visual Designer Michael Maslaney, who’s been spearheading Project Chameleon, the style guide behind this redesign. Another thank you goes to MSU students Owen Carpenter, Joe Chan, Jon Rietveld, and Devan Sayles for creating the award-winning first version of Firefox’s in-content Preferences in May 2012.

Firefox and Flux: A New, Beautiful Browser is Coming

By On April 28, 2014 In Customization, Design, Firefox, internet, Mozilla, User Experience With 208 Comments Permanent Link to Firefox and Flux: A New, Beautiful Browser is ComingPermalink

Tomorrow, on April 29, something amazing is coming to Firefox.

It’s not an interface adjustment or tweak.  It’s not a bug fix.  It’s a complete re-envisioning of Firefox’s user experience, and it’s been brewing for the past five years.

Firefox on Linux, OSX, and Windows

Firefox on Linux, OSX, and Windows

Good to Great

This new Firefox, Firefox 29, was borne out of a series of incredible, detail-obsessed designers and engineers understanding that taking products from good to great requires more than a series of incremental improvements.

Good can be achieved through incrementalism.  Great requires, at times, overhaul.

Firefox 29 contains extensive improvements that were planned back when Alex Faaborg, Madhava Enros, and myself were the only designers at Mozilla.  Back then, Firefox was beginning to buckle under the weight of its inconsistent code and interface.

Realizing the Need for Overhaul

It’s common enough for large codebases maintained across years to develop inconsistencies.  But, Firefox’s nature as an open-source community project contributed to idiosyncratic user experiences.   Menus and dialogs used different tenses and tones.  Add-ons behaved unpredictably.  Customization was handled differently throughout the browser.  Over the past few years, we’ve been working to improve many instances of inconsistent behavior, such as replacing modal dialogs for tab-modal ones, standardizing notifications, and using a uniform tone-of-voice.

Making improvements here and there is often what user experience designers at an organization are expected to do: fix what’s broken, slightly improve what isn’t, and generally don’t get in the way of engineering effort.  But, this method can only make an existing product slightly better, and the gaps it causes reveal themselves in time.

A sinking ship can’t be patched endlessly when it needs a new hull.  This is when user experience design is most effective: when it envisions the system as a whole.  When it steps away from the trees and sees the forest holistically.

Firefox needed a new hull, and the bulk of that hull is arriving on Tuesday.

Others have been blogging about Firefox 29’s beautiful redesign, so I’ll just mention the highlights.

Consistent Customization

Customizing Firefox is now entirely predictable and much more fun.  Rather than digging into Preferences windows and dialogs, you can make Firefox the way you like via dragging-and-dropping buttons wherever you want them.

A Customize panel – itself customizable – displays the tools you want available in a single click but don’t want cluttering your interface.

Firefox Customize Menu

Firefox Customize Menu

Simple and Streamlined

Gone are the bulky angles and edges of tabs and menus.  In Firefox 29, you’ll see streamlined, almost aerodynamic, curves giving emphasis to your current tab and subtly understating the rest.

Streamlined Tab Shape

Streamlined Tab Shape

Themes and Personalization

Making Firefox visually your own is not only easy, but gorgeous.  Lightweight themes look fantastic in 29 with a light interface overlay on whatever image inspires you while you browse.

Lightweight Theme Applied to Firefox

Lightweight Theme Applied to Firefox

Obsession with Details

It’d be hard to describe all the changes coming to Firefox in a single post, but I hope you’ll find that we left no stone unturned.  Firefox 29 is all about details: the glows, the colors, the animations all reflect our desire to make the entire experience seamless.  A special hat tip to our visual designer, Stephen Horlander, for his painstaking eye for detail.

It's All About the Details

It’s All About the Details

Tomorrow’s launch day will, perhaps, be our biggest yet.  It’s certainly an emotional day for myself and the others who have worked on this release for years.  I can’t wait.  I hope you love it.

← Older Entries