Browser bookmarks have been around as long as browsers themselves and haven't really evolved much. But, spurred by the surprisingly little use of bookmarks on the mobile Firefox, Mozilla started asking why people used bookmarks and how they could be made better.
Mozilla's UX team studied how several people used bookmarks and what they were trying to achieve. Mozilla determined that, in fact, people used bookmarks as a "save for later" type feature.
So Mozilla tasked its UX designers with coming up with new and better ways of enabling users to do just that. The results of their studies and design prototypes have been published on Mozilla's UX
blog.
If you're a designer or interested in the area, they should make for an interesting
read. If you're a regular user, you may be more interested to know what Mozilla plans to do in Firefox.
"All browsers support two functions: searching and revisiting. My research questions whether constructs like bookmarks really are the right model to support revisiting," Brian Groudan, a Mozilla collaborator,
wrote.
"I worked closely with Mozilla user experience researchers and designers to rethink how Firefox can better offer 'save for later' in the browser," he added.
At this point, it's just throwing ideas around, but it looks like Mozilla wants to completely revamp the concept of bookmarks in Firefox.
For one, the emphasis won't be on the link anymore but on the content people want to save, a YouTube video, a news article, a photo and so on.
Second, management is going to become much more visual and more intuitive. You can already check out one early prototype, packaged as an
extension, created by Mozilla's Chris Lee. It's not a final design, it may not even be the direction Mozilla chooses to take in the end, but it should provide an interesting perspective.
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