Firefox Foresight: a Mozilla Design Challenge entry

Over the past month or so, Kiran Jagadeesh and I have been working on a design for this fall’s Mozilla University Design Challenge.  The object of the challenge was to address browsing history:
“Browsing History — How can we make sense of this rich source of data and how do we best present this data to [...]

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Design Research Conference 09: Lessons Learnt

Last weekend I was fortunate to attend the Design Research Conference in Chicago (that city of sausage links and thick-necked men, sleek city people clad in black, tall, reflective buildings, and a giant 3D bean-shaped mirror.)
It was by far the most ‘designy’ conference I’ve attended.  It was held at the Spertus Institute, a modern and [...]

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5 reasons I loved Mozilla’s design challenge

I was able to participate in Mozilla’s ‘Spring Design Challenge‘ along with my regular schoolwork this past semester, and it was definitely worth the effort.  The challenge consisted of addressing the following question: “What would a browser look like if the Web was all there was? No windows, no unnecessary trappings. Just the Web.”
Participants submitted [...]

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Enjoyable User Interface Heuristics

I just finished reading Thomas Malone’s 1982 paper “Heuristics for Designing Enjoyable User Interfaces: Lessons from Computer Games.” At just 6 pages, it’s a mere rowboat floating on the sea of my semester’s reading; but I found it exceedingly interesting and helpful. I’ll summarize just a few of his main points, and then include an [...]

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Open Source Design at Mozilla

Today I attended a web-based lecture by John Slater (MozCreative on twitter), creative director at Mozilla, on the open source visual design process. This was part of Mozilla’s spring design challenge lecture series.  Mozilla has used a participatory design process in their recent logo and web redesigns; they’ll often solicit designs from the community, [...]

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Inspiration via…Comcast?

Last weekend I watched an episode of ‘Lipstick Jungle’ with my mom, and found it strangely satisfying – which seemed somewhat shameful as I neither wear lipstick nor stalk urban jungles.  I felt similarly guilty yesterday as I finally created an account at comcast.com and fell in love with their account management interface.  Comcast is [...]

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Illustrator, you are now my friend

I have had this mental block about using Illustrator for quite some time now.  At some point I downloaded a free trial, opened it, and spent about 5 minutes allowing myself to be confused by the interface…from that point on I thought I just ‘didn’t get it.’
Well, those days have gone the way of the…mini [...]

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The future of browsing

Recently two student groups at the U of Michigan School of Information (Social Computing at the School of Information and the Student Organization for Computer-Human Interaction) held a browser ‘design jam.’  The point is to redesign, rethink, and envision the browser of the future.  The jam is a 3-part series, and the results will be [...]

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