Working with UX: an experiment in process

Photo by: Matt Doucett

The Firefox for Android team is embarking on a new experiment towards improving our already-pretty-great integration of UX design & innovation into our product development process.

We’re doing this by introducing a couple of new & slightly more formal steps to the beginning of our feature definition process:

1. Brief: collaboratively develop a creative brief (Product & UX)
2. Brainstorm: create and flesh out a couple of design concepts (UX)
3. Refine: expand upon & fine-tune those design concepts (UX & Product)
4. Pitch: present those concepts to the team as a whole to see which concept (or parts of the concepts) we want to explore further (UX & Product)

At this point, we’re back into our regular feature definition & development process, where Product, UX, and Engineering work together to flesh out, iterate on, and build the selected design concepts.

We’re doing this experiment for a couple of reasons.

First, it will simplify and clarify the interaction between Product and UX — UX will always have a solid idea of what Product is looking for in terms of feature innovation and design work, and it will make it easier for Product to clearly provide that direction.

Second, it will make our feature pipeline more efficient — using this expanded process, we believe that we’ll be able to have more features ready for engineering more quickly, so there will always be a healthy and curated backlog of new and interesting projects that both paid and volunteer contributors can pick up and start hacking on.

For now, we’re going start with this experiment with one longer-term feature (exploring the idea of a kid-friendly “flavour” of Firefox for Android), and a few smaller more focused features (TBD). We’re all pretty excited about trying something new around this, and we’ll be blogging our progress and results so you can all follow along.

As always, you can find the Firefox for Android team in the #mobile IRC channel if you have any questions or just want to chat & hang out.

Next post: What our creative brief is going to look like!

Last call! Feature page survey!

If you have ever used one of the Feature Pages or Feature Lists on the Mozilla Wiki, please help us improve the system by participating in our Feature Page Survey.

We’re going to close the survey down TOMORROW, and we need to get as many responses as we can. The survey should only take 5-8 minutes to fill out, and we’d really appreciate all the feedback we can get.

>>> Feature Page Survey < <<

Thanks!

Mozillians, please help: Feature Page Survey!

If you have ever used one of the Feature Pages or Feature Lists on the Mozilla Wiki, please help us improve the system by participating in our Feature Page Survey.

We’re going to close the survey down at the end of January, and we need to get as many responses as we can. The survey should only take 5-8 minutes to fill out, and we’d really appreciate all the feedback we can get.

>>> Feature Page Survey <<<

Thanks!

NEW! Firefox Features List process change

I’ve made one small-but-awfully-helpful change to how the product Feature Lists are going to work. Now, if you start working on one of the items on the list, please change the “Rank” for that item on the Feature List to “In Progress”. Don’t worry about moving it to the top of the list, we’ll sort that part out.

I’ve done a few on the Firefox Feature List, as an example. Obviously this makes it a lot easier to figure out what is currently being worked on.

If you are working on a Feature from one of the Feature Lists, please do me a huge favour and flag it as “In Progress” on the Feature List Page. Thanks!