How to improve user AMO experience for theme selection?

[KLB]

This morning I got an email from Patrick to pass on to the AMO editors team with suggestions on how to improve user's experience when searching for themes. I forwarded that email on to the rest of the team and have started to get feedback with requests for ideas. Here are Patrick's suggestions:

How AMO could improve the user experience for the Themes section:

1. Revise the Categories.
What the heck do Miscellaneous or OS Integration or Modern even mean?
- Why are these three most popular Categories completely vague? I know some of them have "historical" significance, but it's time to move on. Modern and Misc don't mean anything and if OS Integration does mean something, apparently none of the people putting their themes in that category knows what it means, and I can't hope that users would either.

Why Large and not Assessibility?
- While Large is a vague term that could mean anything, Assessibility users have really specific needs. These needs are NOT filled by Mozilla and Firefox is getting worse and worse about providing a browser that vision-impared users can interact worth. There are many themes in the Large section which are ridiculously hard to look at even for people with perfect vision.

Some proposals for new additional Categories:
- Assessibility
- Dark
- White
- Bright Colors
- Holiday/Seasonal
- Cartoony
- Software Simulations (other browsers or software)
- OSX Look (seems to be very popular on other platforms than OSX)
- Uncategorized (more on that below)


2. Police the Categories.

At some point there needs to be a serious look at how themes are categorized. There are MANY that don't fit into their categories, especially in Large and Compact, which are specifically the two Categories for people who NEED accurate results: Assessibility users and netbook users. If your theme is no smaller than the default then it's not Compact, and if it's not any larger than the default then it's not Large, and it's certainly not for Accessibility users. The randomness of the results of the Categories (as well as the absolute vagueness of the three most popular) makes them useless. Having accuracy in the Categories would be an important part of my final point.


3. Browse instead of Search.

When you are looking for an extension, it makes sense to look up keywords based on what you want to accomplish. This makes absolutely no sense when searching for a theme. Instead, themes should be filtered, similar to how apartment or classifieds listings work on websites. So instead of the starting point being a search box... the starting point is your OS/Firefox version:

Firefox 10
OSX

From there you should ONLY be shown themes compatible with Firefox 10 and OSX. You shouldn't be shown incompatible themes right in the top results like you do now. Incompatible themes are very very unlikely to actually work and only testers should see them. Currently there is absolutely no way for an OSX user to just browse through the available themes for OSX. In the apartment analogy, this would be your price and neighborhood. These are the non-negotiables and should be automatically detected (but with the option of changing). Visually this part would look basically the same as what AMO already does. Filters in the sidebar to the left, sorters at the top.

The next step is to offer the Categories as filters. This should work as a series of checkboxes, with all of them checked by default. At the bottom of that list could be two buttons: Select All, Unselect All. The concept here is filtering by exclusion. So starting with All checked, if I was to uncheck Dark, my results would show all themes that are not Dark. If you look at the top results for Themes right now you will see how popular Dark themes are, and how important it is to be able to filter them out. On the other hand, if you want to only see OSX-like themes you could Unselect All and then check Mac-Look, thereby filtering out everything else:

Firefox 10
OSX
Mac-Look

Which would only show themes that match the Mac look and are compatible with OSX and Firefox 10 in *two clicks*. This is currently impossible to do at all, let alone quickly and easily. Going back to the apartments listing analog, this is like the optionals: pets allowed, smoking, nearby schools, number of bedrooms, etc. Being more picky gives you limited listings, being less picky gives you a wider variety to choose from. Accuracy of the results would depend very heavily on the first two points being accomplished well.

This was the first reply to my email. It is from Andrew who is an AMO Editor:

1. - sounds good. The complicated part will be working out what should happen to themes under the existing categories though (do you clear them and just give them Uncategorized? If so we would have to devise a strategy for contacting all theme developers asking them to reclassify)

2. - not sure about this one. I'd prefer to keep it developer led (and who exactly is going to do the policing?). Maybe we could just add better guidance for developers on what categories to choose.

3. - at its simplest it comes down to having the search filters on browse pages though I suspect it may need a large change in how search/browse is implemented in the back end. Having filters as multiple selections rather than a single selection would also be a significant change. They're worthy improvements definitely but non-trivial so would take a while to implement I'd guess.

Andrew Williamson
AMO Editor

The following reply is from Jorge Villalobos who is the Add-on Developer Relations Lead (aka in charge of all AMO editors):

1. I agree with recategorizing themes. It'd be good to have a discussion with theme developers to refine the category list and provide a final proposal with the most important categories at the top (since we might not accept all of them).

2. You can use Abuse reports for that. It might be abusing the feature (zing!), but people already use it for that.

3. I thought AMO already pre-filtered add-ons by app version (not sure about platform). Does he have the Add-on Compatibility Reporter installed? Like Andrew said, this is the least likely to happen. Search is a tricky thing to get right, and you need to balance usefulness with simplicity.

- Jorge

The following reply was from Axel who is an AMO editor in regards to Patrick's suggestion #1:

To an extent I would also like to have the same discussion on Thunderbird Extensions Categories. I think it is a little bit under categorized, at this stage.

There should be some more Tb specific Categories such as:

Tags
Filtering
Productivity / Message Administration
Calendar
Connectivity / Import / Export
Message Composition
------
Browser Addons - should contain all addons that have Firefox as the main target audience (say having 10times more Fx users than Tb) and that aren't really specific to Tb, such as Adblock Plus or NoScript. IMHO these just muddy the waters as they really focus on the browsing aspect of Gecko/Thunderbird.

I think that would be a good start.

Also, statistics should stop counting Fx downloads/users of multi-app extensions on the Tb AMO pages (I believe this bug was filed already; I believe the update ping has a userAgent, so this is a reasonable request)

So the big question is, if there are going to be new categories for themes, what should they be and how should they be defined so that theme developers can properly choose the categories their themes belong in? Theme developer feedback is clearly wanted and if a clear and logical proposal is brought forth for theme categories it could probably be implemented fairly easily.

[patrickjdempsey]

Thank you Ken.

3. I thought AMO already pre-filtered add-ons by app version (not sure about platform). Does he have the Add-on Compatibility Reporter installed? Like Andrew said, this is the least likely to happen. Search is a tricky thing to get right, and you need to balance usefulness with simplicity.

Here's the basic underlying problem... it only does in *search* mode, not in *browse* mode. Only very recently have the majority of themes that show up on the front page of the Themes section been compatible with the current version of Firefox.

Also, for several months now, the *search* feature has been completely broken for themes (selecting Themes wouldn't filter out Extensions), although it does appear to now be working.

But again, this is beside the point that there is no way to input a search term for something based on visual identification. And on that note, something I forgot in the letter.... search results for Themes that show the icon instead of the preview? Not a positive experience for users. You can either browse and get previews with unfiltered results, or search (for what exactly?) and get no previews with sorta-filtered results.

[KLB]

In regards to #3, I'm working on a proposal for allowing users to easily decide whether to filter out or see incompatible add-ons with the default being incompatible add-ons being hidden.

What I'd like us to focus on is developing a proposed list of theme categories with criteria for each category because I suspect this would be very easy to implement. Once we submit a proposed list of theme categories it might only take a few weeks to be implemented once accepted. Fixing #3 will probably take a fair amount of programming to resolve thus could take some months to iron out.

[KLB]

This evening I got the following email from Justin Scott Add-ons Product Manager for Mozilla:

Category changes are relatively easy to make, so if you and other themers want to work together on a revised list, we can definitely update them. Greg Koberger (cc'd) is who you should work with on this. Please be sure to include which categories are simply being renamed or should be removed and migrated to another category, etc.

Justin

Let's flush out a good list of theme categories with clear descriptions and get Patrick's suggestion #1 fulfilled.

Here is the list of current categories. Many we probably want to keep, but they should be defined as to what qualifies to be in the group. The most abused groups are compact, large & OS integration.:

• Animals
• Compact
• Large
• Miscellaneous
• Modern
• Nature
• OS Integration
• Retro
• Sports

Here's Patrick's list of additional categories:

• Assessibility
• Dark
• White
• Bright Colors
• Holiday/Seasonal
• Cartoony
• Software Simulations (other browsers or software)
• OSX Look (seems to be very popular on other platforms than OSX)
• Uncategorized (more on that below)

Please post your suggestions for a category list as well as the criteria that should be used to determine what themes belong in each category. The more objective the criteria are the better.

[ehume]

So far, it looks good. Thanks for the invitation.

One thing I have not seen in add-on search is the ability to search by author, You need to have an add-on by an author if you want to find others by the same author.

[LoudNoise]

Made into a sticky. Let me know when I can release it.

[KLB]

So far, it looks good. Thanks for the invitation.

One thing I have not seen in add-on search is the ability to search by author, You need to have an add-on by an author if you want to find others by the same author.

Users can discover all add-ons by a specific author if they click on the developer's profile. Also when on a specific add-on's listing page there is a list of other add-ons produced by the same developer on the sidebar. I do agree, however on an advanced search feature it might be nice to be able to search by the developer's name. Or alternatively, the developer's name should be part of the normal search index such that if someone entered say "ehume" into the search box any add-on that had ehume as the developer would be included in returned results.

[ehume]

So far, it looks good. Thanks for the invitation.

One thing I have not seen in add-on search is the ability to search by author, You need to have an add-on by an author if you want to find others by the same author.

Users can discover all add-ons by a specific author if they click on the developer's profile. Also when on a specific add-on's listing page there is a list of other add-ons produced by the same developer on the sidebar. I do agree, however on an advanced search feature it might be nice to be able to search by the developer's name. Or alternatively, the developer's name should be part of the normal search index such that if someone entered say "ehume" into the search box any add-on that had ehume as the developer would be included in returned results.

That's great if they already have a link to a developer. But if I tell a friend that I do themes for Firefox, and they forget the name of the theme, there is no way they can find me or my themes simply by typing in my name somewhere.

[KLB]

So far, it looks good. Thanks for the invitation.

One thing I have not seen in add-on search is the ability to search by author, You need to have an add-on by an author if you want to find others by the same author.

Users can discover all add-ons by a specific author if they click on the developer's profile. Also when on a specific add-on's listing page there is a list of other add-ons produced by the same developer on the sidebar. I do agree, however on an advanced search feature it might be nice to be able to search by the developer's name. Or alternatively, the developer's name should be part of the normal search index such that if someone entered say "ehume" into the search box any add-on that had ehume as the developer would be included in returned results.

That's great if they already have a link to a developer. But if I tell a friend that I do themes for Firefox, and they forget the name of the theme, there is no way they can find me or my themes simply by typing in my name somewhere.

Good point. I'll post a bug to bugzilla on this.

[KLB]

I'm going to make an initial proposal of theme categories t get things rolling. This list is a combination of the current list, Patrick's suggestions and my own ideas. I'm not set on this list, I just want to start a discussion on what categories should be included.

• Animals: Theme must include pictures or cartoons of animals either in background images or as toolbar icons.
• Accessibility: Theme must use larger buttons and text. there must be strong contrast between the text and background colors and there must be clear differentiation of objects that have focus, are hovered on, are active, etc. These themes must assume users have limited vision and/or are colorblind.
• Cartoony: Theme must use cartoonish artwork for background images and/or toolbar button icons.
• Colors - Bright: Theme must make use of bright colors.
• Colors - Dark: Theme must use dark background colors.
• Colors - Light: Theme must use light background colors.
• Colors - Monochrome: Theme should be mostly monochrome including toolbar button icons. The use of color should be limited to security related features like the identity box.
• Colors - OS Native: Theme must rely on the operating system to provide color instructions as much as possible.
• Holiday/Seasonal: Theme must be based on colors and/or images of specific seasons and/or holidays (e.g. fall harvest).
• Size - Compact: The theme's toolbar buttons, text boxes, tabs etc. must use less vertical space than the standard theme
• Size - Large: The theme's toolbar buttons, text boxes, tabs, etc. must be larger than the default theme and ideally icons within the buttons would also be larger.
• Nature: Theme must include pictures or cartoons of of the natural world either in background images or as toolbar icons.
• Retro: Theme must be styled to be reminiscent of older web browser or software interfaces (e.g. previous versions of Firefox).
• Software Simulations: Themes that are styled to look like non-Mozilla web browsers, other software application suites, etc.
• Sports: Theme must include pictures or cartoons of sports related stuff either in background images or as toolbar icons.
• Uncategorized: Any theme that has not been assigned to another category

[KLB]

So far, it looks good. Thanks for the invitation.

One thing I have not seen in add-on search is the ability to search by author, You need to have an add-on by an author if you want to find others by the same author.

Users can discover all add-ons by a specific author if they click on the developer's profile. Also when on a specific add-on's listing page there is a list of other add-ons produced by the same developer on the sidebar. I do agree, however on an advanced search feature it might be nice to be able to search by the developer's name. Or alternatively, the developer's name should be part of the normal search index such that if someone entered say "ehume" into the search box any add-on that had ehume as the developer would be included in returned results.

That's great if they already have a link to a developer. But if I tell a friend that I do themes for Firefox, and they forget the name of the theme, there is no way they can find me or my themes simply by typing in my name somewhere.

See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=724388

[patrickjdempsey]

[*]Colors - Bright: Theme must make use of bright colors.
[*]Colors - Dark: Theme must use dark background colors.
[*]Colors - Light: Theme must use light background colors.
[*]Colors - Monochrome: Theme should be mostly monochrome including toolbar button icons. The use of color should be limited to security related features like the identity box.
[*]Colors - OS Native: Theme must rely on the operating system to provide color instructions as much as possible.

Maybe these could specifically be about the background? For instance there are many dark or light themes with bright colors on the buttons but the overall theme is definitely dark or light. On the other hand something like PinkHope is most definitely *bright* even though the buttons are technically monochrome to the background. Maybe "monochrome" is more about the buttons and the others are more about the backgrounds? Or am I just over-thinking?

Another two that comes to mind:

- Gaming: there are several Gaming-related themes floating around that really wouldn't fit into any other category. Some of them are direct references to video games, some to video game consoles, some to online gaming websites and communities.

- Buttons-Only: the theme style that Sharebird developed I personally think deserves their own spot simply because they are less likely to break from version to version and they keep the default-theme styles for 95% of the interface which some users may prefer.

[*]Software Simulations: Themes that are styled to look like non-Mozilla web browsers, other software application suites, etc.

Should this just be wide open? Camino theme would fit here, as well as MacOSX theme, Strata Reloaded, Strata XP on Linux, etc.

[David.Vincent]

I'm going to make an initial proposal of theme categories t get things rolling. This list is a combination of the current list, Patrick's suggestions and my own ideas. I'm not set on this list, I just want to start a discussion on what categories should be included.

• Animals: Theme must include pictures or cartoons of animals either in background images or as toolbar icons.
• Accessibility: Theme must use larger buttons and text. there must be strong contrast between the text and background colors and there must be clear differentiation of objects that have focus, are hovered on, are active, etc. These themes must assume users have limited vision and/or are colorblind.
• Cartoony: Theme must use cartoonish artwork for background images and/or toolbar button icons.
• Colors - Bright: Theme must make use of bright colors.
• Colors - Dark: Theme must use dark background colors.
• Colors - Light: Theme must use light background colors.
• Colors - Monochrome: Theme should be mostly monochrome including toolbar button icons. The use of color should be limited to security related features like the identity box.
• Colors - OS Native: Theme must rely on the operating system to provide color instructions as much as possible.
• Holiday/Seasonal: Theme must be based on colors and/or images of specific seasons and/or holidays (e.g. fall harvest).
• Size - Compact: The theme's toolbar buttons, text boxes, tabs etc. must use less vertical space than the standard theme
• Size - Large: The theme's toolbar buttons, text boxes, tabs, etc. must be larger than the default theme and ideally icons within the buttons would also be larger.
• Nature: Theme must include pictures or cartoons of of the natural world either in background images or as toolbar icons.
• Retro: Theme must be styled to be reminiscent of older web browser or software interfaces (e.g. previous versions of Firefox).
• Software Simulations: Themes that are styled to look like non-Mozilla web browsers, other software application suites, etc.
• Sports: Theme must include pictures or cartoons of sports related stuff either in background images or as toolbar icons.
• Uncategorized: Any theme that has not been assigned to another category

I agree with your new categories (can you add a customizable category - more and more themes come with options like Nasa, Classic Compact, Noia,..).

Perhaps it will be a good idea to have the choice of three categories instead of two.

- first category : theme (animal, cartoon, retro, OS native,...).
- second category : accessibility or not.
- third category : compact, large, customizable.

Thank you for all your work.

[KLB]

I agree that the number of categories themes can be in needs to be increased, but coupled with better "policing" of the categories to ensure themes are properly categorized.

One of my thoughts is that we need short and long range objectives with theme categories. In the short run the available categories needs to be updated and themes need to be allowed to be in more categories. In the long run there needs to be tools to better moderate theme categories and maybe to create more advanced filtering based on categories where users can filter out results by multiple categories kind of like we see on some shopping sites.

[Ngamer01]

I suggest not having both Colors - Bright and Colors - Light. People will assume both mean the same and throw lights in Bright and throw brights in Light.

Just go with Colors - Bright only for all light and bright themes.