Excellent video by Alex Faaborg, a UX designer for the Mozilla Firefox project. This debate has been going on for ages now, and the Firefox team is settling it once and for all. All of the issues Alex brings up sound perfectly valid and well sustained to me. Totally the right move for Firefox.
I had never thought of the conceptual navigation model of the web browser that way. All of this time we’ve been dealing with a clear distinction between different navigation areas and… well, us users and designers had never noticed it! If anything this truly reinforces that humans can get used to poorly constructed GUIs, if they stick with them long enough.
The scary part comes when we begin thinking about how many times we have transported wrong UI models (and even metaphors) to our own designs and models just because they’re ‘common’. And if so, could we actually say that they’re wrong? After all, if all of our users are used to these poorly judged models, no usability testing will contradict it.
But I also have no doubt that this is a step in the right direction. It makes absolute sense in theory. Well, that and Chrome has been using this model since it was launched and no one complained ;)
Thanks for the share Bruno!
What you say about using flawed models and approaches in our designs makes perfect sense, and I agree with you it’s not “wrong”. If you’re designing for the real world, convention can trump theoretical purity any day. Think about all the major Operating Systems, whose interfaces are fully based on the obviously flawed desktop metaphor.
Note that I’m not saying you should always keep true to tradition: if we always did that, nothing would ever evolve. Revolution, particularly that which concerns human behaviour, tends to happen in small bursts, and is mainly driven forward by newer, smaller products who can afford to take the risk to tread the unbeaten path. Chrome (and Opera) did that with their tabbed browsing approach, and Mozilla is now able to contribute to this small revolution.