What's Your Vision of the Future of the Web? Mozilla Wants to Know
Everything's changing on the internet these days, so it's as good a time as any to make some drastic changes to the way we interact with it too. Mozilla Labs has put out a call for anyone in the world to share their vision of how they would like to see the browser, or the web in general, look and act in the future.
Called The Concept Series, the project will track down and share future web concepts submitted through a very simple process. What would you like the web to look like in the future? We offer one of our favorite visions below.
Interface is of the Utmost Importance
There are few things more important to the user experience than the interface through which we interact with the web. There is SO much potential for improvement in user interfaces! We wrote about some cutting edge strategies in this post in March, User Interfaces Rapidly Adjusting to Information Overload (see the awesome 2D/3D game interface at the end of that post). Lately we've been inspired by the interfaces of apps like Skitch (see video at the very bottom of the page) and Jive's ClearSpace.
The First Round of Ideas
As any good call to action should, Mozilla's Concept Series kicked off with some examples of concepts submitted. All three of the videos below are very well produced but Mozilla says that you can submit mockups, prototypes or ideas expressed with any degree of sophistication. For instructions on making a submission visit the Concept Series announcement or just tag an image "mozconcept" on Flickr. That's what we did with our vision below these videos.
Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.
Bookmarking and History Concept Video from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
Firefox Mobile Concept Video from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
What I'd Like to See
Here's my vision of an interface I'd like to interact with the web through, though it probably wouldn't take much Mozilla energy to make it happen.
I love the Adobe AIR newsticker Snackr but more than that what I want are big pastel-colored buttons that appear wherever I'm interacting with information that I can assign tasks to. As may buttons as I want, with tasks that will send URLs or the information in those pages to another application or webpage. I'd like the buttons to have rounded corners, too. :)
In the image above I've got buttons to bookmark the link I'm looking at in my social bookmarking tool (I use Ma.gnolia), to open tabs searching for the links present in one of my Custom Search Engines, to search for this link in social media discussion aggregator YackTrack and to IM the link to multiple co-workers via Adium. In time I might find that there are other functions I'd like to add, re prioritize or replace the above with. It that too muck to ask? I don't think it is at all. Let me know when someone has built it - but for now, I'll tag it "mozconcept" and cross my fingers.
What about you, what would you like to see the future of the web look like?
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Web browsers are hindered by cross compatibility issues, security paranoia, and offer an all-round poor environment to work within anyway. It's reached the stage where we applaud when websites manage to hack together just some of the functionality we've come to expect in desktop software.
Google's online office suite is a great example. It's a very impressive piece of work but it's lagging a decade or more behind desktop software purely because of the limitations imposed by operating within a browser.
Adobe and Microsoft are both making strong moves to take the web out of the browser and that is the future whether it's achieved by those companies or others.
Marshall, are you tracking the Mozilla Labs "ubiquity" project? While it doesn't offer "big buttons", it does support arbitrary verbs for bits within the browser through a command line interface.
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity
"...Interface is of the Utmost Importance"
Disagree. Utility and function first. See Google homepage. Can anyone provide me an example of a web page or service they use that has a pretty interface but fails to function for them? As far as I know there is no such thing. I see the Google home page, YubNub, the iPhone GUI all as very minimalist ( read: "boring" ) with metric tonnes of utility under the hood.
Anyway, I plan to enter, and win the contest. My design will NOT have any giant primary colored buttons. Sorry Marshall.
Decent file uploading would be good a good start:
- Multi-file uploads
- Progress meter
- upload resumes
All browsers should do this, it should not be up to each site to implement these features with hacky javascript and flash.
The major problem I see with crowdsourcing for this project is that so many people working on submissions for Mozilla will be disappointed if their proposals are not implemented. And thus it won't be a perfect future of the browsing experience for everyone - and probably more people will be disappointed than satisfied.
Ok, people first things first.
Who is the girl in the "Bookmarking and History" video???
RRW do something, I loved that voice.
Marshall,
thank you for the post. It is a great one and especially the videos really help me learn more from how the frontier Web browser researchers are thinking.
According to your question, I would say that browser is going to change. In the future, I would doubt whether we still need to have a browser to "enter" the Web. On the contrary, we will automatically on the Web whenever we open the computer. Or probably even without open computers, we are on the Web since all other devices are hooked to it. Or even ourselves have been part of the Web. (Remember the famous "we are the Web" statement made by Kevin Kelly.)
Does it mean browsers will die? Not necessary. Somehow, browsers will become our "eye" when communicating to the Web. Some other devices will be invented to be our "ear", our "hand", our "foot", our "mouth", etc, when communicating to the Web. We may not and should not try to embed all these functions into browser. It would be too heavy. It is just the same that we should not let our "eye" take care of the functions of the other parts of our body. "eye" is just an eye. We want to develop a perfect eye. But we may not want to make this "eye" also be an "ear" and a "mouth". It is then not a perfection. It becomes a mess.
Yihong
Matthew Paul Thomas posted in 2002 the article “Why Free Software usability tends to suck” ( http://web.archive.org/web/20030201183139/http://mpt.phrasewise.com/discuss/msgReader$173 ) and delivered in a follow up post on 1st August 2008 lots of reasons “Why Free Software has poor usability”.
Item number three on his list is : “Design suggestions often aren’t invited or welcomed.” Mozilla Labs is spot on in trying to address this issue by being “particularly interested in engaging with designers who have not typically been involved with open source projects.” On Matthews list one can find also some reasons why this initiative will face some challenges ( see details here: http://www.line-of-reasoning.com/solutions/usability-of-free-software-tends-to-suck-and-how-mozilla-labs-wants-to-address-it/ ) , but still it is great to see that also in Free Software Design and Usability is a priority.
Rarely do I see such a forward thinking article as this. Who knows exactly what the future of web interfaces will hold. One thing can indeed be certain... with social networking and social media being so hot it must change to remain as successful in the future as it has been in the past.
I hope that we will have the option of assigning more than one category to a module, as I use more than one social bookmark and social network to succeed in Internet Marketing on the Internet.
Rarely do I see such a forward thinking article as this. Who knows exactly what the future of web interfaces will hold. One thing can indeed be certain... with social networking and social media being so hot it must change to remain as successful in the future as it has been in the past.
I hope that we will have the option of assigning more than one category to a module, as I use more than one social bookmark and social network to succeed in Internet Marketing on the Internet.