14 DAY TRIAL // One of the numerous ways Mozilla Labs is using to improve its products is to encourage user feedback, and their latest endeavor was to find the most popular Firefox menu items. In February, they launched a survey regarding the usage of the browser's menu bar, asking respondents to answer three questions: · Which menu items are the most commonly used? · Which menu items are the least commonly used? · How long do users spend exploring the menu bar contents before selecting each particular menu item?
Weeks have passed and time has come to interpret the results in order to create a user-oriented design for Firefox, as inspired by the answers to the first two questions. To create an overall picture, all the generated data has been summarized in a graph that displays how frequent a menu item is used via mouse and keyboard shortcuts, and the first positions are occupied by Close Tab, New Tab and User Bookmark Item. The first conclusion is that Firefox would require a condensed toolbar that would comprise only the most popular items, rather than all the current ones.
To obtain another perspective using the same data, the Mozilla Labs team has come up with a new graph that shows item usage only for mouse UI method (this is justified by the fact that the menu bars have been created especially for mouse use, rather than keyboard shortcuts). The results are different from the first diagram, in the sense that User Bookmark Item becomes the most popular one, followed by Copy, Paste, Add-ons and Back.
As mentioned before, these results have been generated by removing the keyboard-related items, so that it becomes quite clear which are the actions that require the mouse the most. The reason for creating more than one type of graph was that the Mozilla team has thus been able to realize that New Tab and Close Tab are not as essential for the future Firefox condensed toolbar as was initially suggested since these actions are mostly performed by the keyboard (in other words, there is no need to display items that are usually accessed by hotkey combinations as the toolbar is mainly designed for mouse actions).
The third kind of chart that can be created using the collected data is the one that deals with the frequent use of menus, and it appears that the most user-appealing are the Bookmarks and the Edit ones, summarizing more than 70 percent of total clicks.
These results come as a surprise to everyone, and everybody should take into consideration the possibility that aggregated data can easily lead to misleading conclusions, since it is hard to tell if each Firefox user actually accesses bookmarks on a regular basis, or if there are few persons who employ it very often. This issue will be solved in the near future, as the data is more thoroughly analyzed by the Mozilla Labs team.
Firefox can be downloaded from Softpedia via this link. Test Pilot for Firefox can also be found on Softpedia, at this page.
