Introducing Personas 2.0

Editor’s note: The Labs team at Mozilla released Personas 2.0 early this morning. Check out the Mozilla Labs announcement reposted below.

Personas 2.0 offers a cleaner look, clearer navigation, and easier ways to discover and engage new art. Check out the new site here.

The Mozilla Labs team launched Personas 1.0 in March with the idea that it shouldn’t be hard to make your internet browser more fun and personal. Over the past eight months, with your feedback and support, we iterated on the Personas experience fifteen times (10 times on the website, 5 times on the extension) and are now pleased to introduce Personas 2.0.

Here is a screencast by Ryan Doherty, who led development work on the redesign:

Introducing Personas 2.0 from Mozilla Labs on Vimeo.

What’s New?

1. Enhanced look: Thanks to the creative vision and guidance of Chris Howse, the site now has a cleaner look and feel, and also customizes an experience based on whether you are currently using the Personas add-on. The site also suggests more you might enjoy based on what you choose to wear.

2. New features: With your feedback and support, we integrated features like search, and favorites. We also added features to the Personas add-on itself to make it easier for you to discover and manage your persona designs directly from the little fox in the lower left corner of your browser chrome. (see 1.4 announcement and video).

3. More designs: Personas 1.0 launched with less than 150 designs. Thanks to a growing community of contributors and artists, the Personas gallery will likely welcome its 40,000th design by the end of this year. The gallery also includes affinity art from Harry Potter, Vans, Bob Marley, Lilly Pulitzer, and Greenpeace.

4. Easier discovery: To let you discover new artists and designs, we sorted the Personas gallery by “up and coming” designs. This allows you to quickly view personas designs that are gaining popularity in the Personas community. You can also easily switch your view to sort by “popular” or “just added”.

5. Localization underway: the localization and web development teams have worked to make the site localizeable. If you want to join the effort, you can do so here. Thanks to our community of volunteers, many localization efforts are underway, with some nearly complete.

Thanks!

Like all Mozilla projects, Personas is a collaboration between people who develop the product and people who use it. The following people (and many more) have been commited to this product’s success:

  • NinaBella, Digital Blasphemy, MaDonna, and thousands of other artists around the globe that give millions of Firefox browsers a personalized look and feel. They are the heroes of this project.
  • Shae Rivard, who has supported the resolution of over 250 issues on the Personas discussion forum, as well as over 500 other members, whose feedback, testing, and contributions continuously make the product better.
  • Chris Howse for developing a creative vision for the Personas 2.0 site, and Ryan Doherty for implementing and for developing the screencast above.
  • Myk Melez, Toby Elliot, and Zandr Milewski, with the support of Erik van Eykelen, and Jose Bolanos, for collaborating with community feedback to constantly improve on the product. Collaboratively, the development team has fixed over 300 issues since launch.
  • Carsten Book (a.k.a. Tomcat), Stephen Donner, Tony Chung, Krupa Raj, and Vishal Kamdar, for assuring quality releases, and for doing so within incredibly tight deadlines.
  • Amy Zehren, Sean Martell, Catherine Brady, and Julie Martin, with the support of Monique Johnson, who have reached out to countless brands around the globe to share the Mozilla story, and offer them the opportunity to participate in a growing movement.
  • Tara Shahian, Mary Colvig, Melissa Shapiro, John Slater, Sarah Doherty, Jay Patel, and all the other members of the marketing community that helped build awareness around Personas.
  • Seth Bindernagel, Staś Małolepszy, Pascal Chevrel, and all the Persona localizers on Babelzilla (AtteL, dogi, drry, Ersen Yoldac, fernph, Funkin2x, funTomas, Joergen, jojaba, jooliaan, kkemenczy, kustodian, Lisman, lois, loveleeyoungae, moZes, pia, SiiiE, spjutster, steekid, stoyan, Wareczek, and wtspout), who worked diligently to ensure that Personas is accessible in as many languages as possible.

  • What’s Next?

    As Personas crosses 10.5 million downloads and prepares to welcome its 40,000th community design, we will continue make the product even better and easier to use. To continue to evolve Personas quickly, and in the right direction, we need your feedback and participation. Join the conversation in the discussion forum and add helpful hints to the support wiki. And stay tuned to this blog for updates!

    – Ryan Doherty and Suneel Gupta on behalf of the Personas development team


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