Basil's Bodacious Blog

In my last post, I outlined some the design changes we’re planning for AMO.  A number of commenters raised the issue that the design could lead to non-Firefox applications being under-represented on the site — definitely not something we want to do.  So, we went back to the drawing board and came up with what we believe to be a reasonable balance between streamlining the basic use case — a Firefox user grabbing an add-on — and still showcasing the other applications in the Mozilla community.  The mockups appear below.  There are three major changes represented here:

• Removed the “global header” that currently graces most mozilla.com properties to help give AMO an identity, additional simplicity and a logical navigation structure
• Reduced the overall height of the header area which means that you get to the content/meat quicker
• Added an application selector to the “main page” in a prominent position on the page

This raised the question of what are the Mozilla products that should be supported by AMO. Given that AMO is a Mozilla project resource meant to support the Mozilla project’s official products/applications – the list of apps include Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Camino and Sunbird exclusively. (Currently, Camino does not natively include add-ons capabilities or an add-ons manager so it’s not listed). It is expected that as Mozilla’s mobile efforts bear fruit that mobile-related add-ons would be supported as well.

The default entry point advertised by Mozilla application are the AMO subsites: Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Sunbird. This is where the application selector would appear. Currently, the AMO top level page (http://addons.mozilla.org) redirects to a localized Firefox subsite as the majority of users are installing Firefox add-ons.

I think of AMO as a hosting service supporting multiple apps with a shared backend (servers, mirror network, user database, reviews and discussion infrastructure and so forth.) I’ve argued for “segregation” in order for each app to provide (possibly) unique user experiences using app-specific AMO skins/theme, add-on installation options, etc. Our current “subsite” structure essentially offer this today, e.g. categories are app-specific and the recommended add-ons list is unique. I would expect this to continue and would love to hear feedback about unique needs of Mozilla apps so that we can work it into future AMO revisions.

Special Thanks to Madhava Enros and Henry Brown for the overall design and mockups.

Earlier this year, the addons.mozilla.org (AMO) team launched a long-awaited, major rework of the AMO site, called Project Remora. With that behind us, we have been working diligently on AMO v3.2. The goal is to:

• Simplify site interactions and provide a cleaner look
• Based on traffic to the site, about 50% of site visits involve a search for a particular add-on. So, make search prominent and optimize the results.
• Most users come to the front page of AMO looking for Firefox add-ons, so demote the multi-application aspect of AMO (while still providing Thunderbird, Sunbird and SeaMonkey users access to their add-ons).
• Rework the categories and “types” system to provide a simpler install/search experience
• Create a two-tier recommendation system such that we can have add-ons recommended for particular categories (Editor Picks) as well as AMO Front Page (Featured) Add-ons

Below are a few mockups of what we have in store.

Our plan is to rollout these changes during early December.

Looking forward to your feedback and participation.

 AMO Start Page

 Full Listing Page

Details Page

As some of you may know, I’ve been with Mozilla for the past 1 1/2 years working on various projects. I started by establishing Mozilla Labs and kicked off a few projects there; setup a blog plus fora system. Fell into the partnership management stuff with Google and Yahoo. As I got busy with a myriad of Firefox product releases (1.5.0.12 to 2.0.0.5), planning for Firefox 3, even more partner and distribution management stuff, I blogged much less.

In any case, I felt that there were so many great things happening at Mozilla and with the projects that I’m working on that I needed an outlet to share and let everyone know what’s going on. So, I’ll be focused my topics on the plans around Add-Ons, partners as well as data & metrics.

Here we go.