What is Task Continuity?

Task Continuity is the umbrella term the Firefox UX team came up with to try and understand related user behaviors we've seen in last year's user research (Pancake, Save for Later, Hydra, etc.), and trends we've observed around multi-device and Web use. The UX team is currently working on identifying new feature opportunities for Firefox that support Task Continuity user needs.

Note: We'd like to find a better name for this project. If you have any ideas, you can add them to this wiki.

The Highlights of this Wiki Page

This page has lots of good info, but if you just need to (ahem) review the main documents, they are:

• Task Continuity Themes
• Save for Later and Hydra research (get them from the UR team)
• Opportunity Mapping Insights
• Effort vs. Impact Map Notes
• Guidelines for Cupcake Sprints
• Ideas for saving different kinds of content appropriately

Task Continuity Themes

The Task Continuity Themes were created based on our user research, observations of industry trends, and conversations percolating around Mozilla. It's intended to be a framework for organizing all our ideas about Task Continuity.

Permanent links (You can find the latest version of these links in this folder)

• Full Document - explains the themes in detail
• Summary - condensed version of the themes
• 1-Pager - an even shorter, printable idea sketch about the themes
• Sample Concepts - some concrete example of how the themes can help us define features

Related Research

Please talk to the User Research team for more information and their reports.

• Save for Later
  • Research project by intern Brian Groudan about how and why people save things on the Web
  • Intro post: Saving for Later
• How Users Bookmark in Firefox
  • a quantitative heatmap study done by Ilana Segal on how people use various bookmarking UI in Firefox
• Pancake
  • A study by Diane Loviglio about how people search, discover, and share content online
  • Intro post: What Makes People Share Information?
• Hydra
  • A study by Lindsay Kenzig and Mary Trombley about how people perceive their online identities
  • Intro post: Where Do Online and Offline Life Intersect?
  • Related post: Exploring the Emotions of Security, Privacy, and Identity

Other References

• Task Continuity Notes - rough notes and links from the early days of the project
• Concept Week - includes very early brainstorming about Saving for Later

Current Opportunity Space (Saving Different Types of Content)

Once we had the themes, we started to discuss which opportunity space we wanted to focus on initially. PMs, Engineers, BD, & Marketing was involved in some of these sessions with the UX team. After a few different opportunity mapping and brainstorming sessions, the UX team decided to focus on "Saving Different Types of Content Appropriately" as the main opportunity space to continue exploring.

Opportunity Mapping Workshop

This was a 90-minute long remote workshop with PMs, Engineers, BD, & Marketing to go over the Task Continuity Themes and the competitive landscape. The goal of the workshop was to agree on a theme for the UX team to pursue. While we didn't get settle on a theme in the end, we did learn a lot for moving the project forward. See the link below for detailed insights about the workshop.

• Activities (For more details about the activities, talk to Larissa)
  • 1: Mapping the competitive landscape
  • 2: Multi-dimensional SWAG
  • 3: Elevator pitch and Ranking
• Workshop
  • Participants collaborated on this Google Presentation during the workshop
  • Note: you must be signed in to Google Drive with your Mozilla account (not your LDAP) to view this
• What We Learned - detailed insights about the value we got from the workshop

Brainstorming

In preparation for our Work Week in Toronto, we focused on brainstorming on the different Task Continuity themes for a couple of weeks using a variety of techniques. The goal was to come to our Work Week with the broadest possible range of ideas, having explored various facets of the theme deeply.

• Brainstorming activities
• Schedule of activities

Synthesis (Impact vs. Effort Map)

The goal for this week was to identify themes and ideas that we thought were promising enough to start prototyping and exploring as design concepts. With the help of PMs and some Firefox engineers, we organized the best topics and ideas into a big "Effort vs. Impact Map". From our four top topics, we decided to focus our initial prototyping efforts on "saving different kinds of content appropriately" because we had a lot of low effort, high impact ideas for this topic.

• Topics that bubbled to the top:
  • Saving different kinds of content appropriately (see the Cupcake Sprints section below for the list of ideas)
  • More powerful search
  • Sharing across devices
  • Awareness of the user's context (and in some cases who the user is) and being ready for him or her
• Pictures
• Effort vs. Impact Notes - List of categories from the map

Cupcake Sprints

The Firefox UX team is now working in small, informal teams for "concept sprints" for some of our "saving different types of content" ideas. These sprints will be small, quick prototyping exercises where we test out assumptions about the user need, our design, and the technical feasibility. The prototypes are meant to be throwaway learning experiences that will help us better define the goals of what we want to build. Once we have a handful of these concept sprints completed, we'll do some user testing and co-design. We'll also invite various stakeholders to a presentation where we'll share what we learned.

Note: They're called "cupcakes" because they're meant to be small but complete product ideas, as opposed to "wedding cakes" (I can't find the source of this article!)

• Guidelines for Cupcakes - What each cupcake should have to be complete
• Saving different kinds of content appropriately - list of ideas and names of people working on some of them
• Concepts - Dropbox folder where people are putting their concept work