Initial instructions and plan for our fall 2009 Mozilla Design Challenge, the topic of which is "browsing history." These slides are for the first event, to be held 9/17/09.

1. Mozilla Design Challenge ‘ 9
Rethinking browsing history

2. Tonight’s plan
★ Introductions
★ Brainstorming
★ Sharing ideas
★ Forming teams

3. SOCHI officers
• Katie McCurdy
• Jeremy Canfield
• Debra Lauterbach
• Laura Rodrian

4. Events
• Join our email list & facebook group (SOCHI), and
follow us on twitter (@umSOCHI)
• Upcoming - Meet & greet with MiUPA and MOCHI
• Happy hour with Yahoo! on Sunday
• Lunchtime talk with Community Manager f/Yelp
• SOCHI show and tell - a working time every
Thursday night at Design Lab 1.

5. Who are you?
• Name
• Year
• Specialization
• What you did over the summer (briefly)

6. SOCHI + Mozilla = friends

7. • 4 sponsored design jams last year
• Plus spring mentoring challenge and
summer design jam
• Mozilla wants to contribute - spread
excitement about open source and provide
students with great opportunities/exposure
• SI students and alums are involved with
ongoing ‘open source design’ at Mozilla

8. Past Mozilla Challenges:
• Flash prototype for Arcilight
• Narrated video for TabViz
http://design-challenge.mozilla.com/summer09/
• Mockup and HTML/CSS/jquery prototype
for ‘page element viewer‘
http://katiemccurdy.com/designs/prototype/index.htm
http://katiemccurdy.com/designs/katie_mccurdy_mozilla.png
• Stop animation for Accordion tabs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_Qw8YfHMks
• More info on the SOCHI site!

9. Take advantage!
• TabViz won 'Best in Class: Innovation" and
this earned them a lot of attention &
writeups on various tech websites
• I got an internship as a direct result of
being able to show the design work I did in
a Mozilla Design Challenge.
• There are lots of opportunities for
collaboration and Mozilla is really excited
to work with students.

10. Browsing History
How can we make sense of this rich source
of data and how do we best present this data
to the user?
• Save your browsing history and make it easily
accessible
• Let the system give good advice in a user-
friendly way

11. Think outside typical
browsing history...
How can we use past browsing behaviors to
augment current and future behaviors?

12. Research
• Most people don’t use browser history - it’s either too
complicated or they don’t know it exists. They use search engines or
reconstruct the path to the webpage.
• People often keep the browser open for days at a time
• Colors/images are easier to remember than URLs/textual descriptions
• Frequency of visitation - we visit different sites in different patterns
• “Fast” - short-term, high-volume pattern, like shopping
• “Medium” - regular hourly checking like email/news sites
• “Slow” - rare but regular visits like to personal interest sites
• Idea: segment the history so that it treats these pages differently
according to the user's patterns
• More ideas: predict if a page is due to be revisited soon, make it available
to the user. Change color of URLs depending on if it is predicted to be of
interest to the user.

13. Resources
Concept series blog post about the Uni challenge: http://labs.mozilla.com/conceptseries/2009/08/31/
design-challenges-fall-09/
Design challenge home, with links to some past research: http://design-challenge.mozilla.com/uni-fall09/
Integrating back, history and bookmarks in web browsers: http://www.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/
grouplab/papers/2001/01-IntegratedHistory.CHI/00-IntegratedHistory-CHI.pdf
Scott Berkun blog post, How to Build a Better Web Browser (2004) http://
www.scottberkun.com/essays/37-how-to-build-a-better-web-browser/
Tabviz post on user interviews/behaviors: http://tabviz.org/?p=153
Finding pages from browser history article http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22417/?a=f
Eytan Adar paper on browsing history http://portal.acm.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/citation.cfm?
id=1357054.1357241
Firefox add-ons relating to history: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?
q=history&cat=all
More resources/research in the Mozilla wiki! https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Design-Challenge/Uni-
Fall09

14. Today’s Plan
• 10 minutes: do 10 sketches in 10 minutes,
individually
• 25 minutes: form groups of 2 or 3 with at
least 1 person you don’t know, share your
ideas and choose a few to develop on the
whiteboard
• 40 minutes: share your whiteboard sketches
with the group, give and receive feedback
• Rest of the time - mingle, talk to people
whose ideas were interesting to you!

15. The rest of the
challenge
• Interested in someone’s idea? Think about
collaborating!
• October 8th - first checkpoint, bring
your progress to SOCHI show and tell
(sketches, mockups, whatever!) and get
feedback
• November 1 - end of challenge, submit
work (a video to show your idea is ideal)