Last month we shared some of the progress that’s happened since launching the Hatchery. This post will mark a series of bi-weekly communications we’ll have to share both updates on our efforts and projects (“What’s Hatching”), as well as some best practices we’ve gleaned from places like WebFWD and the industry (“Hatch This”) to give you support even if you aren’t yet in the Hatchery.

If you’d like to get added to our email list, hatchery@mozilla.org, please email us at labscoaches@mozilla.com; we’ll ultimately migrate to using this for our communications.

What’s Hatching

In addition to getting lots of interest from the community to help coach Hatchery projects, we promised to provide greater focus on the areas we at the Hatchery are best equipped to support.

Given the great interest and enthusiasm – and newness – of Firefox OS, we’re currently going to focus our support on projects that build HTML5 mobile apps and related services. In addition to the priority that we believe this category represents for the future of the web, focusing on this form factor means we can leverage existing assets like the Marketplace, build program infrastructure that will apply to all projects, and scale better. If you have any questions on this, send us a note at labscoaches@mozilla.com

Hatch This

If you’re wrestling with a product idea and wondering if it makes sense, there’s no substitute for user research. And there’s few people better than Mozillian Diane Loviglio to help walk you through how to do user research in an effective way. In this post and video, Diane first helps us understand what user research is, and provides us with some great tangible actions you can take to start to vet your idea in the real world, with real people. It’s one of our WebFWD teams’ favorites.

So please, check this out, go forth and talk to users!