{"id":1341,"date":"2012-10-30T11:30:17","date_gmt":"2012-10-30T18:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/ux\/?p=1341"},"modified":"2016-02-19T14:41:37","modified_gmt":"2016-02-19T06:41:37","slug":"visualizing-the-future-of-bookmarks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/ux\/2012\/10\/visualizing-the-future-of-bookmarks\/","title":{"rendered":"Visualizing the Future of Bookmarks"},"content":{"rendered":"

How do you save pages for later? That’s of the questions that user researchers at Mozilla have been investigating recently (see findings by Brian<\/a>, Ilana<\/a>, and Diane<\/a>).<\/p>\n

As a user experience design and engineering intern, I spent a good portion of this summer beginning to re-envision the latter part of that process: how do you access what you’ve saved? After all, what’s the use of saving something if it’s just going to collect dust in a list of hundreds of other things you’ve saved?<\/p>\n

My research and design process began with a peek at Firefox’s existing Tab Groups<\/a> feature and eventually moved into Bookmarks territory. I assessed Firefox’s current Bookmarks and History manager, whose interface hasn’t seen significant updates in a while. I looked at services like Pinterest, Tumblr, and Readability, which provide their own takes on the bookmarking paradigm. I made a hypothesis that the popularity of these services is a result of not just appealing social media features but also interfaces that take advantage of modern advances in usability.<\/p>\n

Eventually, I found interface inspiration from a surprising source: the album grid and album list views in iTunes! The hardest obstacle in designing an interface for bookmarks is the sheer amount of information to represent in a clear and concise way. I listen to music pretty constantly while working, and one day, it occurred to me that music managers have to tackle a very similar problem and have some decent solutions that could inform this project.<\/p>\n

While doing all this research, I generated plenty of ideas about bookmarks as well as paper wireframe designs. Then I took all this research and design to the code stage. The result is an experimental prototype called Mozaic<\/a> that, while in no way complete or perfect, I hope will help inspire the future of browser bookmarks.<\/p>\n

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A few features of Mozaic:<\/p>\n