Alex Faaborg

Last weekend Mozilla sponsored and participated in the fifth FLOSS Usability Sprint. The purpose of free/libre open source usability sprints is to get user experience designers and interaction designers in the bay area involved with open source projects, and to get open source projects actively engaged in improving their usability. In addition to Firefox, teams at the sprint also worked on improving the usability of Chandler and Wiser Earth.

Looking at the Firefox team’s progress quantitatively, over the course of just three days we were able to identify 20 user interfaces in competing browsers that we felt could potentially improve Firefox, we found 60 usability problems with Firefox, and we brainstormed 40 ideas for directions Web browsing user interfaces can potentially take in the future. Notes from the sprint are located on the mozilla wiki. Mozilla also hosted happy hour events on Friday and Saturday in the evening and sprint participants consumed 15 pitchers of beer. For the next sprint we’ll try to get our stats even higher!

These usability sprints are incredibly valuable to Mozilla because with only three people in Mozilla’s User Experience team, it is great to increase our ranks, even if only momentarily. Also, working with talented user experience and interaction designers who have a completely fresh perspective on some of the UI issues we are facing is extremely useful. In particular I want to thank Min Wu, Chun-Yi Chen, and Jon Slenk for the prolifically critical heuristic evaluation of Firefox they did on Saturday. Also thanks to Daniel Schwartz and Jon Slenk for organizing the event.

If you are a user experience designer in the bay area, these sprints are a great way to meet other people in your field, to level up your skills, and to work on an interesting project. If you are running an open source project, these sprints are a great way to get high quality user experience consulting for free, and to considerably improve the usability of your application or site.