Test Pilot recently concluded a study on how the Firefox menus are used. Now, the results are in, and the data is available.
The study was designed to answer such questions as: Which menu items are used most often? How often do people use keyboard shortcuts to activate these items? When using the mouse, how long do people spend looking for the item they want, and which menu items take people the longest to find? You can read more background about this study here: Menu Item Usage Study.
Mozilla Labs is continuing to analyze the over 8,000 submissions we received as part of this study. At the same time, as part of our goal of being an open research lab, we are offering the data as a public resource. Various sample sizes of the data can be downloaded from this page, which also includes an explanation of the file format. The data has been sanitized and aggregated to ensure the privacy and anonymity of those who participated, so it contains no URLs, bookmark names, or anything of that nature.
We encourage anyone with an interest in usability research to download these samples, do their own analysis and draw their own conclusions. We would love to hear what you can find.
If you are looking for data samples from older studies, those are available too:
- A Week in the Life data samples
- Accounts and Passwords data samples
- Tab Open/Close data samples