Why I'm Switching From Chrome To Firefox

When Google Chrome came out of Beta, I switched to it as my primary browser. I like Chrome very much, but now I'm switching back to Firefox. There are a couple of reasons. The biggest pain is that I see this message a lot:

There are a lot of sites that routinely use forms as you navigate through them. Amazon, one of the biggest sites on the internet, is one of them, but they are hardly alone. When you go Back in Chrome, you frequently see this page. I never want to see this message again. I don't want Chrome resubmitting the form for me. It's almost always the wrong thing to do and that politely worded message is almost always incorrect. I want it just to show me what was on my screen 3 seconds ago. For example: when I add something to my wish list on Amazon, Amazon adds the item to the wish list and shows me a bunch of suggestions. If I click on something that looks interesting, then go Back, Chrome wants to resubmit the form that I didn't even know existed. If I don't, I can't see the suggestions again. But, if I do, Amazon tells me that the item is already on my Wish List and still doesn't show me the suggestions. How about this instead: a message that says "This page may be out of date."

But, wait, there's more.

I was in the midst of giving a demo of Groupthink using Chrome and a page simply didn't work. It loaded, but nothing was live in the page. What's going on? It turned out that one of the JavaScript files I needed wasn't loading because I didn't have a network connection (everything else was loaded from the server I was running locally). Had I been using Firefox, I would have seen a note about errors in the lower right corner of the window. But Chrome showed me nothing -- it just made me look bad.

I use Faves for permanent bookmarking (if you haven't tried it, it's the best bookmarking service out there, bar none). This means that I don't have very many browser bookmarks. But, I do have about a dozen that I use all the time. One obvious one is the Fave It! bookmarklet, but I also have a bunch that I use every day (Puzzazz, draft.blogger.com, App Engine Local Admin and App Engine Server Admin are my top bookmarks). In Firefox, these are easily accessible from the Bookmarks menu. In Chrome, I have two choices -- permanently give up screen real estate for an ugly bookmarks bar, or use the bookmarks dialog. How about a Bookmarks menu?

Those are the biggest items, but there are other nits:

• I run Chrome in full screen mode. When I drag out a tab, I'm doing it because I want to see it, not because I want most of it to be off-screen.
• When I don't have very many tabs, how come they're not wider? It's not uncommon for me to have five tabs that are all named "Amazon.c..." and, of course, I can't tell the difference between them. Even better, provide a way to show little thumbnails underneath all the tabs, either as an option or as a temporary state.
• Chrome conveniently will only auto-enter addresses that I've actually typed. I like that. But, it will also auto-enter incorrect addresses that I've typed and there doesn't seem to be a way to get it to stop doing that.
• Why doesn't the History show me the URLs of the pages? There are lots of sites out there on which every page has the same name. And why can't I right-click on an item in the History to open it in a new tab?
• If the cursor is positioned over a Flash control (which I have never clicked in), Backspace doesn't work to go back. If the cursor is positioned over an image which has been opened, Backspace doesn't work to go back.
• When I open a link from another application (like Outlook), Chrome opens a new window instead of a new tab. That is, unless it's already done that once, in which case it uses that window. But, in either case, I still end up with two Chrome windows instead of one.
  
• It seems to me that Chrome expires cookies early sometimes. As a result, I'm logged out of sites that I expect to still be logged into. I've had Chrome suddenly stop accepting cookies, for no apparent reason (fixed by quitting and relaunching).
  
• Pages that look like they're complete sometimes continue to have a spinning disk indicating the page hasn't loaded.
  
• What was the idea behind not having visible buttons for the prev/next menus? I will say this is better than the brain-dead single history menu that Firefox 3 introduced, but is it really necessary to be so minimalist that there isn't even an affordance for a common action?
  

There are also a few features that I'd love for Chrome to have:

• Narrower window mode -- unfortunately, there are still lots of web sites that stretch all the text to full-width on my 24" monitor, making it harder to read. Amazon, one of the most popular sites on the Internet, is one of these sites. I'd like to be able to tell Chrome that certain web sites should be given a narrower window width. Yes, I can drag the tab out and shrink it, but it would be great if it could be done automatically whenever I visit the site.
• A real debugger. I'll settle for having Firebug work, but I think the devs at Google can do a lot better.
  
• Support for the Web Developer toolbar, or something like it. I'm not a big fan of the Web Developer toolbar (it's pretty clunky), but I use it in Firefox because there are a bunch of really useful features. The ones I use most often: Disable Cache, Disable JavaScript, control over cookies, form overrides, and View Generated Source.
• I'd like a master password like Firefox has and I'd like the saved passwords actually encrypted with that master passwod. Instead, I tell Chrome to not remember passwords.
  

If it weren't for the problems, I actually prefer Chrome over Firefox. It's faster and it's less cluttered. It's elegant. I like how it automatically updates. But problems like this make Chrome look a lot like a Beta product, despite the fact that Google pulled off the Beta label.

I look forward to switching to Chrome again when it really launches.

UX Office Hours Takeaways On thisDev

I blogged about a bunch of takeaways from my once-a-month UX Office Hours today on my thisDev blog. Some tips on focus, pain, priorities, competitors, and stickiness.

Check it out here.

Look At Your Own Product

I had UX Office Hours at StartPad again today. Two of the people that I talked with today were building very different products, and we had very different discussions about them, but the takeaways were very similar. I promised not to publish details, so what I write today will be a bit vague.

The first person is building a web service for Windows users that is supposed to be an integral part of their workday. He'd built a lot of behind-the-scenes infrastructure plus a Windows application for his users. The good news was that it all worked pretty well. But the bad news was that he had built an interface that is similar to some of the parts of Windows and Office that users find the most confusing.

The other person is building a Facebook application. The good news was that he has a unique value proposition which I think will go over really well with users. But, before new users get to the value proposition itself, he's asking them to refer their friends, then he was giving them lots of messaging about the value before delivering any actual value.

Both developers had made the assumption that what was good for somebody else was good for them. Yes, Windows and Office are very successful, but that doesn't mean that any particular pieces of their interfaces are good, nor does it mean that emulating those pieces is good for another product. Similarly, there are tons of Facebook apps in which the very first thing you do is invite your friends -- send them imaginary chocolates, virtual flowers, or make them a knight in your kingdom. But, that doesn't mean that's the right thing to do for all applications. In both cases, the result of these assumptions was a number of unnecessary obstacles placed in front of potential users. And, as I've said before, every obstacle is a reason for users to go away. Instead of looking at how other products do things, they need to look at their own product -- put themselves in their users' shoes and think about what will drive adoption.

On the positive side, both products had resisted the temptation to broaden their reach. They were both focused on doing one thing really well and I have to say that it's great to see it (one of them had even implemented and then removed a de-focusing feature). As a result, I think both of them will have a relatively easy time modifying their products to better reflect their users.

My next office hours are December 11th, 2:00-6:00PM.

Twittering Puzzles

This is really cool to see in my Twitter stream:

I like this because it's a very nice, simple way to spread the word about Puzzazz and increase viral signups. Simply set up twitter in your Puzzazz preferences, and you'll automatically get a tweet each time you solve a puzzle. I don't tweet misses, only solves, so you never get embarrassed.

There are two other recent changes to make Puzzazz even friendlier. You can subscribe to the Puzzazz feed in your blog reader, or you can sign up to get puzzles emailed to you every morning.

Lose the Landing Page

This month, I'm mostly blogging on thisDev about my 30-day adventure to build a consumer web service from scratch. Today's topic is about user experience and I thought it's interesting enough to cross-post.

It's about the landing page, that stalwart of web sites that serves as a gateway (or a roadblock) to the rest of your site. If you're thinking about having a landing page on your web site, the short version is: don't.

For more details, read 19 Days: Lose the Landing Page.

Designing the Puzzazz Logo

One of the most popular posts on my web site is about logos: One Thing About Logos. I'll have to admit it surprised me, but, more than six months after I posted it, it still gets hits every day from people trying to figure out how to design a logo, or how to get somebody else to design a logo for them.

So, here's another thing about logos.

This is the logo that I created for my new puzzle web site, Puzzazz (which you can read about here). The first thing I did was define what I wanted the logo to convey. Puzzling, a sense of fun, solid, but not too professional.

Next, I put the word Puzzazz into a lot of different typefaces -- about one hundred in all. I really wanted to get a feel for the word and what would reflect my values. This was really useful, but I didn't pick the font just yet, although I'd narrowed it down to a set of about a dozen sans serif and lightly serifed fonts. Instead, I turned to what the entire logo was going to be.

With most logos, you have two basic options -- an icon or symbol plus text, or just text, possibly stylized or incorporating an icon as a letter. For an icon, you really need a solid icon and I just couldn't see that here. Most of the icons I could think of were tied to a specific puzzle type and the only one I had that wasn't was a "?" symbol -- and that just didn't work with Puzzazz. So, I started looking at the letters and what I could do with them.

Puzzazz has four Zs in it. Do you know how many words have four Zs in them? Not counting "pizzazz," which was the inspiration for Puzzazz, there are two (that's a bonus puzzle right there). But the four Z's are both an opportunity and a problem. I spent a lot of time creating Zs. I took Zs out of a bunch of the fonts I was considering and tweaked them. I created some really cool Zs and some really cool ZZ pairs. But, basically, they were all too cool. The Zs were so neat that the other letters were overshadowed and the whole word became harder to read. If I pumped up the volume on the other letters, the whole word just became wacky. So, I realized the Zs were more of a problem than an opportunity and I had to make them pretty normal.

So, I turned to the P, which isn't too surprising. After all, when a logo has a special letter, probably nine times out of ten, it's the first letter. It was at this point that the idea of combing the P with a ? occurred to me. I drew a few and realized it was time to figure out the overall look. So, I went to my narrowed-down list of fonts and picked one. Here's the font I ended up with:

If this doesn't look familiar, it should -- it's Arial Bold. But, if you compare the letter forms to what I ended up with, you'll see they're all different. Still I liked the overall letterforms and it's a lot easier when you have a starting point than if you start from scratch. First, I adjusted the weight of the letters to something I liked better, and I reshaped the Zs to decrease their heaviness and take away the rigidness that I feel the Arial Zs have. The angularity and steeper vertical lines also makes the negative space in the two ZZ pairs more irregular and more interesting, which is important to keep those letters from dominating. Next, I created the P, figuring out the size so I could get the ? in there and make sure both the P and the ? were completely readable without interfering with each other. Finally, I replaced the A with a completely new letter modeled on the U, which eliminated the visual breaks around the A and gave the whole word a more uniform look. With the logo almost complete, I tried a bunch of different sizes for the P (relative to the other letters) to see what would give me the best look, and I ran the logo by a bunch of people to get feedback on the sizing.

Now I was ready for color. I tried a bunch and liked a lot of them, so I decided to use them all and not have an official color for the logo. On the web site, you'll see the logo in 9 different colors. And here it is in another color:

Finally, as befits a logo for an internet site, I created a favicon of the P:

So how did I do? Let's review the key things that I said any good logo should have:

It's about one thing. The P is it.

There can be a second element for flavor, but it has to be subservient to the one thing. The rest of the letters, even the Zs, are not a second element -- they're just letters which fit the word, which was the whole point of drawing them. You could argue that the colors are a second element, but that's certainly subservient since, at any given time, you only see the logo in one color.

The logo must reflect the identity. Let's see...
Puzzling - What could be more puzzling than a question mark? And embedding it inside the P means that some people don't notice it immediately, which provides a nice discovery moment for them.
A sense of fun - I think the ? conveys this a bit and the colors help.
Solid - The weight of the letters conveys solidity. The Zs are simpler than many, which reinforces that.
Not too professional - The pointed corners on the Zs and the curves of the U and A help pull the logo back from being too professional.

The logo must look good in black & white. Got it, though I do think it looks great in color.

No tiny detail. Check.

I'm happy with it.

Takeaways From UX Office Hours

I had my first User Experience Office Hours today at StartPad. The idea is that, once a month, I'll spend half a day helping whoever shows up with user experience issues. It's free and I don't get anything for it (in fact, if you count parking, it costs me). I'm doing it largely to give back to the community, but I'm not oblivious to the fact that my efforts might indirectly contribute to a future consulting gig or even a job. Even better, maybe I'll benefit because somebody else with skills that I don't have will step up and end up helping me in the future.

One interesting thing today was how different and how similar my four visitors today were. Because I didn't say I was going to blog about it, I'm going to have to omit the details this time around.

Two of the people had completely unpolished user interfaces and two people had user interfaces that were attractive already. The four products were in four completely separate areas with radically different user bases. Two were pretty early and two were getting ready to ship.

Three of the four shared a common problem -- they were doing more than one thing. Here's a good rule: Do one thing and do it really well. This is a good rule for UX in general -- focus your UI on what you want to enable for your users and make every part of your UI resolve around it. But, this is a particularly good rule for startups. You simply don't have the time or luxury to do two or more things.

Put another way, your startup is making a bet. What is that bet? Figure it out and go all in. Don't make two bets or five bets. If you believe that your widget is going to change the world, don't also build an anti-widget just in case you're wrong. That's a way to fail even if you're right.

Not surprisingly, all four really needed to understand their potential users better. This is an issue even at big companies. There are lots of techniques for this, but, fundamentally, they all boil down to this: if you were a user, what would you want? One guy's project is for use by experts in a particular domain. He didn't even know how lucky he is -- there is no UI easier to design than one that's for experts. Experts know the domain, so you don't have to explain anything to them. They're willing to learn your product if it makes them more efficient. If you're a developer, think what you want from your IDE. Raw speed. Same here. This doesn't mean you should make it ugly, but looks certainly aren't the high order bit.

In another case, a small company had built some really cool technology which integrates with software from a certain large company. But, they're trying so hard to fit in that they don't stand out. In a large sense, their company is predicated on the notion that the big piece of software isn't satisfying the needs of some users. I think they're right. Yet, their small product looks too much like the big product. In terms of the user interface, it's similar in more ways than it's different. And they need to be different -- if the big product isn't satisfying user needs, they need to be less like it, not more like it. They need to understand those dissatisfied users, figure out how what they've built will satisfy those users, and put that front and center. Unfortunately, it's hard work, so this problem was the one where I was the least helpful.

All in all, I think it went well. I learned a few things myself and I certainly hope my visitors found it useful. Future office hours will be on the third Thursday of the month, so that makes the next one Thursday, October 16th, from 2-6PM at StartPad. Maybe I'll see you there.