Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog

“Should we add it?” – Persona height adjustment

13 responses

Personas continues to be a smash hit among Firefox users and boasts a vibrant community of users, artists, and reviewers with over 200,000 personas to choose from. That said, we should continue to explore ways to enhance Personas together as a community. “Should we add it?” posts like this one, will give us an opportunity to gather community feedback on various features and functionality we are considering.

A segment of users have voiced the opinion that they would like the ability to see more of a given persona. Often times the reason for this request is that the persona image is cut-off by the browser’s UI elements, leaving the persona looking less attractive, or in the case of textual content, unreadable. However, there is a trade-off in user experience, adjusting the viewable area of your persona will come at the expense of the vertical space you have to view web pages.

To help answer the question of “Should we add it?”, I put together an add-on (built with the new Mozilla Add-ons SDK, naturally!) that enables you to expand the viewable area of your persona by adding up to 100px of space to the top of your browser: Personasizer

Try out the add-on with a persona and let us know what you think with this nifty voting form:

13 comments on ““Should we add it?” – Persona height adjustment”

  1. vs wrote on

    While I may not use it on my laptop/netbook due to limited vertical screen space, would definitely consider it on a 23″ desktop monitor. So yeah, add the option, of course making it customizable and assuming no performance drawbacks.

  2. Ian Thomas (thelem) wrote on

    I voted no, because of the effect I think it will have on the community.

    If you are forced to have a limited size, then that will be taken into account when personas are designed. If you have the option of asking to user to give your persona more space, then you’ll start seeing personas asking people to do that.

  3. RNiK wrote on

    What about this ==> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=588432

  4. Michael Kaply wrote on

    Shameless Plug.

    Personas Interactive already has this feature and many more.

    http://brandthunder.com/personas/

  5. Kevin Dwinnell wrote on

    We found our users liked it when we put the feature in our Personas Interactive extension (brandthunder.com/personas).

  6. Percy Cabello wrote on

    Definitely won´t trade content for persona pixels, but would like an option to drag a persona so I get to see exactly what I want of it. Should be accessible from Customize Toolbars or maybe the Addons manager as is should be a persona specific setting.

    I also remember to have read in one of the very early posts about personas that there would be an option to subscribe to a persona so it could change over the day or days for example to reflect the time of the day or season. For example I could have an abstract theme that could change colors as it goes from Halloween to Thanksgiving to Christmas, winter, etc.

  7. نواعم wrote on

    We found our users liked it

  8. Otto de Voogd wrote on

    Wouldn’t a scalable persona make more sense? At least one that scales to the available space while maintaining aspect ratio.

    Personally I wouldn’t want to make my UI bigger just to see more persona pixels.

    Other things I think would be nice, is for the designer to be able to anchor the persona differently (not always the top-right for the top image and bottom-left for the bottom image). For instance I’d like to anchor the bottom image to the bottom-right sometimes.

    1. Daniel Buchner wrote on

      We are working on the things you mentioned, look for updates very soon!

      – Daniel

  9. Michael Kaply wrote on

    Daniel:

    I hope you guys aren’t going the same route as the original Personas and making up new names for the various attributes.

    For Personas Interactive, we deliberately picked attributes that mapped to the JavaScript names of the various CSS attributes.

    Would be nice if you guys did too.

  10. Michael Kaply wrote on

    Here’s our documentation for reference:

    http://brandthunder.com/personas/development-specs.php

  11. Anonymous wrote on

    Many people won’t notice and those that do can get this add-on. Personas Interactive already has this feature. Personas should be designed to fit inside the space they have and there shouldn’t really be much if any text on them. This will satisfy a subset of a subset of users, and this is more decorative than anything. If it’s glaringly obvious and doesn’t add much code then do what you want. I like Personas, but I think anything other than the basic implementation Fx has now would be a little redundant, as other features could be added with extensions. I understand there are little things that will always need to be changed and of course they should be implemented.

  12. Erick wrote on

    Off topic. I want to make some personas skins availables from my site, how can I make it as it is done at addons.mozilla.org ?