Test Pilot/Universal Search

Introduction

Universal Search is intent on connecting users with the content they've found or want to find on the web. How can we make it easier to navigate to that site you're looking for. How can we improve the search experience, layout, presentation, performance to bring user delight? How can we better update and deploy the search experience in a more dynamic manner? We hope to solve some of these user challenges with Universal Search.

Our first product milestone is a unified location and search experience coupled with an augmented places database.

Road Map

• Land initial prototype in UX branch
• Implement metrics/KPI for usage stats in nightly/devEd/beta

Landing prototype in the UX Firefox Branch

• The location bar drop down UI will be updated and cached from a remote server.
• Layout can be customized and tested.

Baseline Metrics

In order to establish a comparative baseline against which to test our prototypes, we need to better understand how users use the:

• location (awesome) bar
• the search field
• open up common sites
• find sites in their history
• how they find and navigate to new sites.

Universal Search Metrics

M1. Make it easier to update and A/B test the location bar drop down

• Use HTML5/JS/CSS
• Enable A/B testing, fractional deployment
• Enable remote updating of the content and layout
  • A base layout will ship with Firefox binary but a newer version can be fetched and cached

Dependencies

• Need test and infrastructure that supports
  • Fractional deployment and metrics to validate release
  • Clear testing process and acceptance
  • Revert to last good version of iframe contents

Resources

Contributing

• Have great ideas about search features? Let us know: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/universal-search-ideas
• Github repos below. PR away!

UX

• Universal Search vision presentation: [coming soon!]
• Universal Search MVP UI: https://people.mozilla.org/~jgruen/universal-search-mvp/
• Universal Search UX Idea Backlog: https://trello.com/b/5IwogY0o/universal-search-ux

Repos

• Universal Search Add-on: https://github.com/mozilla/universal-search-addon
• Universal Search Content: https://github.com/mozilla/universal-search-content

Communication

• IRC: #universal-search
• Mailing List: universal-search@mozilla.com
• Weekly coordination meeting notes: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/universal-search-coordination

People

• Lead: Nick Chapman
• Product Manager: Bill Maggs
• Program Manager: Edwin Wong
• Engineering: Jared Hirsch, Les Orchard
• UX: Bryan Bell, John Gruen