Labs/Site 2.0/Concept Series Tool - User Stories
Concept Series - User Story A
Adam is a young, inspirational designer - he is in the final year of his HCI studies and is bursting with ideas on how to make the web a better place. As an avid Firefox user he became aware of the Concept Series' "Call for Participation" through a blog post on Open Innovation which was linked on a blog Adam reads regularly. Adam has an idea on how to make browser tabs better - a feature he uses heavily and believes that it is "not right yet".
Adam visits the Concept Series site - he is immediately sucked in by the overall positioning and the vibrancy of the community. There are dozen of great ideas, mockups and prototypes highlighted on the site. He starts exploring the idea section to see what other people think about tabs - a simple search for the keyword "tabs" reveals a bunch of submitted ideas. The ideas are presented in a graphical way, showing Adam there is already one (or in some cases more) mockup, grouping of similar ideas (based on context) - thus providing a great starting point for Adam to explore. After looking at some of the ideas and mockups, leaving a suggestion on a mockup and posting a question on one of the ideas, Adam sees one idea which sounds very similar to what he is thinking about. Adam decides to build on this idea - he is thrilled to collaborate with someone he has never met and who - in this case - is actually even from a different continent. He posts a suggestion on the idea page, explaining a few tweaks he believes would make this idea much stronger. On the idea page is a big, friendly "call to action" asking people to create a mockup as none have been produced for this idea yet. Adam is intrigued.
Only a few hours later a couple of people have commented on Adam's suggestion and confirmed his idea. Adam decides to build a quick mockup to highlight his design idea and get more feedback. With a few clicks Adam uploaded his mockup and tied it to the original idea. As his mockup was rather rough - Adam simply sketched it on paper and scanned it - a couple of people (who comment very positively on Adam's mockup) suggest to turn it into a quick prototype: Something which you can click at - done in simple HTML, CSS and Javascript. Adam is not a programmer - but Bert, one of the community members who commented on Adam's mockup, sends Adam a short email and asks if they should work together to build a prototype. Adam is excited.
A week or so later Adam and Bert have built a prototype - a "browser in a browser", which allows you to explore Adam's concept of tabs. Both Adam and Bert receive rich feedback from the Mozilla Labs community on the prototype - they point out some little tweaks which could make the whole concept more useful, one community member provides an enhanced graphic for one of the elements in the prototype and quite a few community members simply congratulate Adam and Bert on their well thought-through submission. The Mozilla Labs team, which gave feedback during all phases of the project, decides to feature the prototype in the editorial section of the Concept Series site to encourage more feedback - as this could be a strong contender for a full-featured Labs project. Adam is delighted.
Concept Series - User Story B
Becky is a graphic designer. She works in a small graphic design agency, and learned pretty much everything she knows about graphic design on her own (she studied art at college, but decided that graphic design was more "her thing"). She considers herself a pretty creative person, which is one of the reasons she is mostly bored at her job. Designing stationary for clients isn't the most exciting thing in life for Becky. To channel her creativity Becky designed a bunch of t-shirts which she sells via Zazzle; and on the weekends she designs websites for friends (and friends of friends). She often finds herself thinking about user interfaces and how one could improve them.
A little while ago Becky stumbled upon a blog post highlighting the Mozilla Labs Concept Series. Becky is intrigued - she used Firefox on and off and always felt that Open Source is something for geeks. The Concept Series seemed to be different - in the blog post they were talking about having more people from diverse backgrounds being involved in the innovation process, not only developers; and making the results open for everyone to use and iterate upon. Becky likes the idea - she surfs to the Concept Series site. She spends some time clicking around, reading a couple of the ideas which were posted by people from all over the world and looks at mockups and prototypes. On the homepage of the Concept Series site the Mozilla Labs team have highlighted three ideas which seem to have a lot of potential, and have asked the community to contribute a mockup to make the ideas more feasible and real. That is the point Becky decides to become involved.
Becky starts with creating a mockup for one of the ideas - she likes the idea and has a good sense of how it should look. A few hours after posting her mockup the community have already begun to give Becky feedback - some are encouraging posts, some are criticizing some of her design decisions - but in a constructive way, and some are giving Becky great food for thought. Becky is delighted - here is a community of like-minded people who give her great feedback. And Becky is proud: On her Concept Series user profile a badge has appeared - she now is a "Mockup Artist". Becky is hooked.
From this moment on Becky becomes more and more involved in the Concept Series - she gives other designers feedback on their mockups, quite often not only writing her suggestions down, but also creating a revised version of the mockup. She loves the iterative process and openness of the community - and she (although she probably would never admit it) is very proud of her status: Over time she collects badges for "Brave Commentator", "Mockup Master", "Famous Question" and many more. She becomes friends with a bunch of the people in the community and even organizes a Labs Meetup in her hometown where she meets two of the people she knew from the Concept Series site in real life. And just a month ago the Mozilla Labs team asked her if she would like to become a "Community Champion", helping new community members to find their way around, and supporting them along the journey. Becky is thrilled.
Last week Becky received an email which excited her - Chris, the co-founder of a small tech startup, saw her work on the Concept Series site, checked out her user profile and wanted to know if Becky might want to build a series of mockups for his startup. Chris particular liked a series of mockups Becky did to show a new way to present tabs, and would like to use something similar in their upcoming product. Becky is excited.
Concept Series - User Story C
Charles is one of the core contributors to a small Open Source project. He works as a freelance developer, and spends most free nights submitting code to the Open Source project. He is their sole front-end developer, so the whole team quite often depends on him. He loves working on the project - it's rewarding, the people on the project are great, and he greatly enjoys it when users write to him, tell him about how they use the product, and thank him for his great work.
Recently Charles hit a wall - he needs to come up with a solution to present historical data in an easy to understand, easy to navigate and meaningful way. He spent hours and hours on the web searching for reference designs, existing solutions he might be able to use or at least build upon. But somehow nothing he sees seems to fit with what he is trying to achieve. Charles is frustrated.
David, Charles' colleague in the project points out the Mozilla Labs Concept Series to Charles - mentioning that there is a huge repository of great ideas, mockups and prototypes which might at the very least inspire Charles to think in different ways about the problem. Charles decides to give it a shot - he visits the Concept Series site and starts poking around. He is pleasantly surprised to see so many great ideas with a vibrant community, and lots of great discussions happening. Charles is intrigued.
After spending some time on the site Charles starts to use the search functionality to narrow his search - to his surprise he finds a couple of ideas, a bunch of mockups and even two prototypes which center around the idea of displaying browsing history in a new, graphical way. Charles looks closer at the mockups and plays with the prototypes - one of the two looks like something which would solve his problem in a very interesting way. Charles is excited.
Charles reaches out to the person who built the prototype, and also the person who originally contributed the idea to the Concept Series. A few days later they are talking on the phone - Charles is delighted to learn that everything in the Concept Series is licensed under Open Licenses making it easy for him to include the designs in his own work. Charles asks Emma, who built the prototype, if she would be interested in helping to turn her prototype into an actual product. Emma is thrilled and agrees to help Charles. A few weeks later Charles, together with Emma, present their solution to the other contributors of his Open Source project - it is an instant hit and everyone agrees on rolling this new history view out with the next release of the software. Charles is over the moon.
