Firefox's Ben asks a fair question. I know that with 20 extensions, I certainly fit in that category. And Firefox has passed the Mom test -- I've successfully converted my Mom to Firefox and she loves it. That said, I hope that the Firefox team takes a close look at some of the recent feedback from Adam Kalsey, another long-time user of Firefox. I disagree with Adam about recommending Firefox -- it is already a safer and more usable browser than Internet Explorer. However, some of his comments makes sense to me, especially the part about the website and adding a new tab button.
My suggestion? It costs a little money, but nothing beats doing user testing with real live users, with the developers out of the room, but able to watch and listen through a one way mirror or later on video. Every project where I've done one of those tests it has revealed huge gotchas that we weren't aware of. And for the developers who have had to listen to all the criticism and debates, for all the things that worked or that users liked, they could then say -- "according to our user testing, 95% of users loved/had no problem with feature X." So I hope the Mozilla Foundation finds a little money to do user testing before they release Firefox 1.0
Posted by tbishop61 at September 11, 2004 01:54 AM | TrackBackMy apologies, but my web hoster has turned off commenting, due to a flood of obscene spam bringing the server to its knees. I hope to have this weblog transitioned over to Wordpress in the near future, so that I can have commenting up and working again. Until then, please feel free to send me your comments via my email contact form.. Please ignore everything below this comment.
Blake Ross says that Mozilla Foundation just finished user testing Firefox. Will the Mozilla Foundation release the results?
Posted by: anon on September 13, 2004 01:49 AM