Aurora: Design Themes
by Jesse James GarrettOf all the ideas we talked about while designing Aurora, we kept coming back to a core set we considered essential, high-priority elements of the browser. These ideas clustered around four major themes:
Context awareness: Is there another product that has the potential to know as much about us as the web browser? Not only does the browser touch every aspect of our lives — our work, families, social connections, entertainment — but the data that flows through it is so semantically rich. If the browser paid attention to all that data, and also paid attention to our behavior as we interact with that data, it could find patterns and adapt itself to ease the difficulty of managing our interactions with the Web. Add to that the ability of the browser to be aware of your physical context, and the possibilities expand even further.
Natural interaction: Most of our interaction with technology involves levels of abstraction. Windows, menus, and toolbars are notional objects bearing little resemblance to real ones. The trouble is that dealing with all these abstractions is hard work, cognitively. The brain really wants to interact with a familiar system: the real world. So we designed Aurora to leverage natural interactions wherever possible, with objects in space or those with a sense of physics to them. The Mozilla team liked this approach as well: one of the core Aurora concepts, the spatial view, has already found its way into some of the work Mozilla is doing for Firefox Mobile.
Continuity: Another area that both Mozilla and Adaptive Path were keenly interested in exploring was the idea of continuity of the browser experience. We didn’t want to design different interfaces for desktop, handheld, and wall-mounted devices. We wanted to come up with a single, consistent interaction model that could apply no matter what size screen you were using, or what means of interacting with the device (mouse, touchscreen, gestural controller) you had at your disposal. Also, we wanted to explore how the Web experience could be seamless across devices — so people could move from one context to another, always picking up right where they left off.
Multi-user applications: The Web is something that people use together. But the browser has historically been a single-user application. A browser built with multi-user applications in mind could provide a platform for much of the functionality we now see being re-implemented and reinvented on a site-by-site basis. Collaborating simultaneously in a common space, sharing information with others, and recombining or remixing elements from the Web all become common, assumed functions of any website.
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August 4th, 2008 at 11:24 pm
[...] Concept video: Part 1 - Design themes (the four major themes or high-priority elements of the browser) - Inside the design process and [...]
August 5th, 2008 at 10:17 am
Great video. A couple of questions and observations.
1) I saw that cool 3-D mouse and it occurred to me, that the technology exists to actually see images in 3D on a LCD, though it requires special glasses. Would this not help the usability in some scenarios?
2) It is interesting to me to note how the interface takes a few queues from virtual worlds such as SecondLife from SF’s Linden Labs. On considering this, it actually makes perfect sense, in that 1) The future web will include a lot more live social interaction between users (represented by avatars of some kind) in order to get things done, 2) there is a conceptual/relational/semantic geography of content, 3) content and tools have become more metaphorically like objects handled in 3D space. As for my second point, would it not be true that some people would be “hanging around” certain concepts in real time? Perhaps you will present that in an upcoming episode.
August 5th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
Altogether, really fantastic! Lots of interesting details–looking forward to the other videos. Congrats Jesse and Adaptive Path!
I love that multi-user applications are so core to the design context. Though, I guess it’s too much, at this point, to imagine hardware designed for simultaneous use by multiple people, rather than every individual at their own separate device.
I also love that the operating system isn’t asserting its utilities all over the place.
One request, in case this becomes an actual blueprint for any future implementations: please don’t turn the sound effects on by default! While audible cues can be a brilliant means to convey status and other feedback on interactions, I hope the TV/video-dramatization of computers via sound effects isn’t assumed as an ideal for future interfaces!
August 6th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
I was truly blown away when I watched this concept video. Ironically enough, a co-worker and I had a very similar discussion the other day regarding the next generation of collaborative web sites and adaptive, tag related content browsing.
We all know that the natural connection between computers and the internet will come to a day when the whole computer is basically a portal and the browser is the OS. The hardware and the software to run the device will simply be the gateway. When we get there, the traditional top nav, left nav, single person view of the internet will no longer support the vast amount of data that a person may interact with. Having a means of dynamically relating content and adaptively managing experiences based on use in a three dimensional experience will be essential.
This is not simply a “cool” factor, but a future that will only be acknowledged by adaptive and innovative thinkers.
August 8th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
[...] We couldn’t tackle as many aspects of the Web as we would have liked. If we left out something that you think is important, it’s not because we thought it wasn’t. We had to set priorities, and we did that by focusing on the areas outlined in our design themes. [...]
August 13th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
[...] Aurora scenarios: the desktop as well as the large-scale, gestural interface. Continue reading this post by Jesse that explores the design themes that drove the three [...]
September 3rd, 2008 at 10:55 am
that is the best soft i ever seen. When and on wich website i can download aurora?
October 20th, 2008 at 3:51 am
[...] Temi di design (i quattro temi principali o elementi di maggiore priorità del [...]