FLOSSUsabilitySprint1107/Heuristic

Visibility of system status

Types of system status

• System resources (task manager, activity manager)
  • Network activity
  • CPU usage
  • Memory usage
• Content area loading
  • If the page/content area is loading
  • ajax httpxmlrequests after the page has loaded (does hitting stop actually stop?)
  • Page creating and accessing cookies
• Firefox activity
  • Searching bookmarks/history in the sidebar and location bar
  • Deleting cache/cookies/history etc.
  • Updating: downloading, installing, etc.
• User's mental model of the browser's status
  • What site am I on? phishing?
  • Am I online? Did my connection drop?
  • Do I have viruses?
  • Am I safe? Are things ok?

• When you are matching text in the sidebar, we need to bold or highlight the matched text in the results, similar to what we are doing in the location bar search.
• Preferences: feedback on if settings have been saved or not
• When is loading done? Due to Ajax it is never really done. There are a lot of cases with ajax when the progress bar claims that the browser is done loading, but then a lot of stuff still is popping in, or images are being adjusted.
• A lock with a red line through it, what the hell does that mean? Make up your mind.
• Edit> Undo needs to actually say what is going to be undone. For a web browser the action of undo is really ambiguous.
• When I click on a link, is it going to open a new window, a new tab, call javascript, is it going to open a pdf, what is going to happen?

Match between system and the real world

• The software update dialog box gets anoying, user's think "why do these guys need to update their software every few weeks, it was fine the way it was, I don't want to wait because they thought it was worth wasting my time to change something." In reality we are applying really important security updates. We should check the type of version change and if it is a point release, say "we are apply security updates to keep you safe."
• History sidebar: we say 4 days ago, but it would be much more useful to say "Last Tuesday".
• The clear private data dialog: What is "cache", or authenticated sessions? This is the implementaiton model, a single site might have data in all of these categories, but the user wants to delete all references to visiting a certain site, and not various pieces of the implementation model.
• Security dialogs
• Cookies
• Web page is a single thing, a single piece of paper, not a collection of separate items.
• What does "http" mean?
• Does the star really mean bookmarking? Stars seems to imply rating, but bookmarking is kind of like a very primitive form of rating.
• Bookmark all tabs sounds like it is going to create a single bookmark for each of the tabs, not a single thing.

User control and freedom (undo)

• Place the remove button on the "Page Bookmarked" notification, to give user's a way out of the action without having to hit "more" and hunt for it.
• Let user's revert to the previous version of Firefox easily, instead of asking them ahead of time if they want to apply the update anyway (also this might allow us to install in the background so user's don't have to wait on launch).
• Private browsing mode. Also add the ability to delete recent history (essentially undo).
• Back button support in web applications, a lot of users will have the mental model that back means undo.
• When the user clicks undo, how do they know what is actually undone?
• What does "Edit > Undo" actually do? I have no idea.

Consistency and standards

• User may confuse star with go, now that go is gone (for the reload case). Less of an issue if the star is inside the location bar.
• History button needs a drop down arrow on hover to indicate that it will produce a menu on click.
• The site button has a drop down, but what it produces is not a menu, but instead a panel. Is this inconsistent?
• Unstarred icon, the outline, looks like it is disabled, and the starred icon looks like it is enabled, instead of unbookmarked/bookmarked. Suggested that it is always a full star and gains a check mark when bookmarked.
• constant desire to click command-s when editing a wiki. If we let the user's save the contents of a text area quickly, we end up with three saves (save the page to disk, save to the server, save to cache to recover later).
• New bookmarks dialog: "how can I add new tags?"
• Preferences: we have dialogs inside the dialog so does ok->cancel keep the items set before the ok? It doesn't. One way of avoiding this issue is to use progressive disclosure controls instead of layers of ok/cancel.
• Preferences: there are a bunch of internal consistency issues with the dialogs hanging off of the preferences window.
• Preferences: ok/cancel visually groups to the current tab, not the entire window. Consider adding a horizontal line above the ok/cancel buttons, possible color change.
• SSL: in IE yellow means possible danger, and in Firefox a yellow location bar means SSL.
• Keyboard shortcuts are different from other web browsers
• IE calls bookmarks favorites, uses a star. We use a star but call them bookmarks.
• tabs hanging up versus down, and other browsers.
• star creates as contextual dialog, and the Web feed button loads a new page in the content area.
• Searching in the bookmarks sidebar also searches history items, so the list will actually get longer when user's are used to filtering.

Error prevention

• Back and forward buttons, end up getting the menu instead of the button.
• Keyboard shortcuts for the web app interfere with the keyboard shortcuts for the browser.
• Check if a number is a credit card number using a checksum and don't remember it in case the user's computer is compromised or stolen.
• You bookmark a link, but then the link is gone and you lost all of the information.
• pdfs are like little browser freezing bombs on the internet, user's are annoyed when the click on one because of the lag and delay. We need to tag the mouse cursor to indicate that a PDF is going to load.
• closing a tab by accident sucks, and it isn't discoverable at all.

Recognition rather than recall

• when you hit the alt key show all of the keyboard shortcuts for various areas and controls.

Flexibility and efficiency of use

• Round buttons should still have square click areas
• let users search just for a tag with a particular syntax in the location bar
• Upgrade dialog gets in your way, and when you tell it to go away, it gets in your way again!
• Upgrade dialog: let user's know how long it is going to take, and let them cancel out to do it later.
• Bookmarking: the "new folder" button is hidden behind the progressive disclosure control, which is not very discoverable.
• Bookmarking: when creating a bookmark, user's may want to organize their other bookmarks at the same time.
• Text search should have "whole word" option (e.g. looking for "for" will find "formula" "therefore" etc.).
• When trying to download something to the disk, the button for saving the file is sometimes disabled and it is rather unclear how/when it can/will become enabled and let you actually save.

Aesthetic and minimalist design

• why is showing the latest headlines one of the primary browser controls?
• the identity window is not at all minimalist, or really aesthetic.

Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors

Types of things that go wrong when browsing:

• Network is down
• Site is down
• User types URL incorrectly
• User goes to phishing site
• You update and the new version breaks a web application you use
• Browser crashes

• Allow users to revert to the previous version (like 2.0.0.9 to 2.0.0.8) after the upgrade.
• The network down page should automatically load the page you wanted when you do get an internet connection, similar to Safari.
• When we know the user is on a phishing page for ebay, we should give the user a link to the real ebay to help them complete their task, instead of just stopping.
• Can the browser differentiate between the site being down vs. the internet being down (site doesn't load, so you go to google.com to see if it loads).
• If the internet is down, and the page is cached, we need to be able to show it to you.
• Smart URL corrector extension

Help and documentation

• HELP WINDOW IS MODAL!! (how has no one noticed this yet?)
• training mode, if you close as tab an overlay tells you that you can undo.
• when you enter full screen mode, temporarily show a message saying you can hit esc to exit (especially when full screen is actually full screen)

Design Ideas

• plus button for new tabs, have it on the left side. Great idea: use a drop down arrow on the plus button to have the user's bookmarks toolbar items, so they can save vertical space and these are still easily accessible.
• History button: have a natural mapping for the back list and the forward list by placing them next to each other, but not integrated into a single list.
• tagging: when they don't have any tags, have the self describing field say "type new tags here." After they have tags, change it to "tag one, tag two, tag three." What if the user literally types "new tags here."
• Bookmarking and history seem barely sufficient, might be interesting to bring people in and see what their actual needs are. If it gets too big it starts to fall apart, both in terms of implementation and usability.
• Avoid gratuitous design, don't do a visually design just for branding or to look cool, it has to be about usability as well.
• Activity monitor, instead of a fast blitz of text in the status bar
• When the user is importing bookmarks from a particular browser, ask if they would like to switch their keyboard shortcuts to match that browser.