{"id":1429,"date":"2009-03-23T11:37:56","date_gmt":"2009-03-23T19:37:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mozillalabs.com\/?p=1429"},"modified":"2009-03-23T11:37:56","modified_gmt":"2009-03-23T19:37:56","slug":"firefox-new-tab-page-cognitive-shield","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/labs\/2009\/03\/firefox-new-tab-page-cognitive-shield\/","title":{"rendered":"Firefox New Tab Page: Cognitive Shield"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’ve been iterating quickly over the last<\/a> couple<\/a> of weeks<\/a> to define a potential new tab screen for Firefox.<\/p>\n

The feedback for the last major iteration<\/a> was largely positive, and it seems like we are on the right track. But we ran into a paradox.<\/p>\n

We believe that the new tab screen should have two main functions: (A) To show you the sites you are most likely to be interested in going to, and (B) to not distract you. That’s the paradox: by design success is when the pages we show are maximally interesting\/distracting, but an explicit goal is to not interrupt your flow.<\/p>\n

This iteration focuses on solving that paradox by proposing a solution that we’ve dubbed “the cognitive shield”.<\/p>\n

The Cognitive Shield<\/h3>\n

No matter where we put the links to your most visited sites (and their latest news), it always seemed to be a distraction, based upon our own perception and the feedback from thousands of testers. Given that the bulk of those testers are multi-tasking-adept early adopters, we’d expect that feedback to be even stronger from more mainstream users. Our original thought was to place the links along the bottom of the page — outside your foveal vision. In practice, the peripheral vision proved too strong, and the links still drew your eye and interrupted your cognitive flow.<\/p>\n

The cognitive shield hides the distractions until you move the mouse. Then the links fade in quickly.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Here’s the thinking:<\/p>\n

If you are typing a destination into the navigation bar, then your locus of attention is on the place you are trying to go — so we should stay politely out of your cognitive way. On the other hand, if you are using the mouse than you will probably benefit from the mouse-based navigation aid, so show it.<\/p>\n

Whether you are using the mouse is a good indicator of whether you are in a cognitive flow or not. That realization resolves the paradox: the links are there when you need then, and not when you don’t.<\/p>\n

The Design<\/h3>\n

The design of the cognitive shield is a ring of 8 circles, each containing one of your top-visited sites. We think of it as a personal watermark.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We went through a number of metaphors for the cognitive shield.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Instead of a metaphor which always strains — what symbol represents frequently used sites? — we went for an abstract glyph.<\/p>\n

Known Bugs<\/h3>\n

There are a couple more features we’re in the process of adding. In particular: The ability to manually add a site is entirely broken. There’s no way to change the total number of frequently visited sites shown. There may still be encoding problems for non-roman scripts. Middle-clicks may be broken. The visual style needs a refresh. And the sites don’t remember their new positions post restart.<\/p>\n

Testing the Prototype of New Tab<\/h3>\n

Step 1. Download and install<\/a> the latest development build of Firefox 3.1.
\nStep 2. Download and install<\/a> the latest version of the New Tab prototype.
\nStep 3. Let us know what you think<\/a>, including what works, what doesn’t and how we can improve the design.<\/p>\n

— Aza Raskin, for the “New Tab” team<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’ve been iterating quickly over the last couple of weeks to define a potential new tab screen for Firefox. The feedback for the last major iteration was largely positive, and it seems like we are on the right track. But … Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[4863,19585],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/labs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1429"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/labs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/labs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/labs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/labs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/labs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1429\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/labs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/labs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/labs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}