ReadWriteWeb

If you want to help Mozilla to make Firefox better but you are not a developer, here is your chance. Earlier this year, Mozilla announced the launch of Test Pilot, the organization's new distributed usability lab. Test pilots will be enlisted in various usability tests and will be some of the first to see some of Mozilla's ideas for new user interfaces and Mozilla Labs products. We first wrote about Test Pilot when it was just a "still-in concept platform." Now, however, you can download the Test Pilot add-on for Firefox 3.5 here and begin to help Mozilla make Firefox even better.

Editor's note: we offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write 'Sponsor Posts' and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.

Senior Wired Magazine editor Robert Capps penned an article titled "The Good Enough Revolution" for Wired's September 2009 edition. The print edition included the daring (and perhaps intentionally provocative) subtitle "Why lo-fi tech will rule the world."

This rings of an absolutism, and such rings set off our antennae.

If you want to help Mozilla to make Firefox better but you are not a developer, here is you chance. Mozilla just announced the launch of Test Pilot, the organization's new distributed usability lab. Test pilots will be enlisted in various usability tests and will be some of the first to see some of Mozilla's ideas for new user interfaces and Mozilla Labs products. We first wrote about Test Pilot when it was just a "still-in concept platform." Now, however, you can download the Test Pilot add-on for Firefox 3.5 here and begin to help Mozilla make Firefox even better.

If there's one thing that social software can never get enough of, it's usability testing. Good old WordPress has the advantage of a global community of super loyal fans to tap for testing, and this morning that's just what the company announced it is going to do. WordPress usability testing is being opened up to the community of users.

It's worth noting that WordPress isn't just any chunk of software: it played a formative role in the early days by giving millions of people a voice online. It's still one of the best examples of an open source ecosystem which has been made infinitely more rich for users by involvement of outside developers than the company could have created by itself. And it's a system used by some of the biggest publishing firms in the world at a time when the publishing industry is undergoing one of its biggest periods of change ever. CNN, Time, the New York Times and millions upon millions of bloggers are all using WordPress. Helping test the next version of this software is a pretty big deal.

The most-watched geek event of the day has to be the OpenID UX (User Experience) Summit, hosted at the Facebook headquaters. The most discussed moment of the day will surely be the presentation by Comcast's Plaxo team.

Plaxo and Google have collaborated on an OpenID method that may represent the solution to OpenID's biggest problems: it's too unknown, it's too complicated and it's too arduous. Today at the User Experience Summit, Plaxo announced that early tests of its new OpenID login system had a 92% success rate - unheard of in the industry. OpenID's usability problems appear closer than ever to being solved for good.

Google posted an update about its eye tracking usability studies today. Most of the results are not exactly groundbreaking. It is, for example, no surprise that most users only scan the first couple of search results. Indeed, most Google users don't seem to scan much further than the second result. There are, however, some interesting nuggets of information in this post about how Google uses this data to study every aspect of its search results page.

As a concept, OpenID has shown a great deal of potential. But that potential has often been hamstrung by the series of hurdles through which OpenID users have been required to jump in order to use their credentials. When Facebook Connect entered the distributed digital identity fray, those OpenID usability problems came into stark relief. Now, Google and Plaxo have responded with a new workflow for OpenID logins that simplifies the process and improves the usability - by adding OAuth and the Google Contacts API to the mix.

Doing extensive usability studies has always been a problem for open source projects. Mozilla has decided to implement a new way of tackling this problem for its projects and is moving ahead with the Test Pilot project, which was first announced last year.

Test Pilot is currently only a "still-in-concept platform," but the plan is to build a representative sample of Firefox users that will be recruited to evaluate new interface concepts and features.

When it comes to Web design and development, one thing trumps the latest technology and cool features: usability. Why? Because all of the features and functions in the world are completely worthless if a human user is unable to figure out how to use them. But testing against human factors, creating use cases, and observing focus groups can prove to be a costly endeavor for even the largest of companies.

Now, there's a cost-effective means of seeing how usable your pages are: Userfly, a simple way to test your site's usability for free - with one line of code.

Yesterday, I was with my wife in the L'Occitane store. The shelves were filled with fragrances, soaps, lotions: all sorts of handcrafted beauty products. It occured to me while looking at the labels that I have no idea how these products were made. I am reasonably versed in chemistry, but the process of manufacturing perfume is not something I know anything about.

In general, I am just not good with physical things, because I am a software person. I've always been fascinated by people who can easily make sense of physical objects, because for me it takes a lot of effort even to put together children's toys. My brain is wired differently, to see patterns in software, not in hardware. But most people are the other way around.

Netvibes, one of the many personalized homepage products available today, has just announced a new feature which allows users to share anything from their Netvibes pages - not just tabs, but also articles, widgets, and RSS feeds. This new feature allows those items to be shared via integration with two of the most popular social networks: Twitter and Facebook, the latter being powered by Facebook Connect. What's not to love? As it turns out, based on the comments found on the Netvibes blog, users are not happy about this change.

There are more startup tech companies launching this week than almost anyone can keep track of, but any time a new service launches - one thing is key to its survival. The initial User Experience has to be compelling or any new application is going to be passed up in favor of whatever shiny object is next in line.

What's a company to do? Luckily, there are people who specialize in the field of User Experience (UX) and many of them share their best practices freely. We see applications all the time that are based on a great idea but are poorly designed in a way that leaves us frustrated and unlikely to return as users. Below are some of our favorite resources for companies that want to smarten-up quickly about User Experience.

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.