Letting users lead a rethinking of Firefox's settings section.
How might we apply user centered design practices to give users better control of their browsing experience?
While user testing password management, I noticed that few users could locate much of anything quickly in Firefox Preferences section.
When the Taipei team was relieved of a major project, I proposed that we form a team to apply user centered design principles to the problem.
I conducted the initial rounds of tree testing to measure how quickly users could locate specific settings. Then I designed a card sorting exercise to derive a user-centered grouping.
In order to understand how users perceived the groupings, we deployed a card sorting exercise to have them tell us which items fit together.
Five variations of groupings were then tested to see which resulted in users finding a specific preference the fastest. We eventually settled on these five sections.
I mentored the team weekly for the first half of the redesign. They used the research as a basis for the work and documented multiple iterations thoroughly by Tina of the Taipei team.
I'm very proud of this project because I was able to set the direction early, remain grounded in user research, and hand off to a highly capable team who exceeded my high expectations.
Users were able to locate a list of commonly accessed settings with a 36% increase in speed.