The Problem
The Envisage group set out to reconstruct a better web browser using the Mozilla open source interface. Through this project, we hope to design a browser that does not have the problems that plague the more popular browsers. Using data collection and consolidation, we will add new features to increase efficiency and remove functions that are causing inefficiency. The user group to be interviewed, we term intermediate users. This group is defined as using the browser for five or more hours per week. Advanced users are those who have previously redesigned a web browser. We concluded that this advanced group is a small percentage of web users. Therefore, the group of intermediate users is a large pool, which will help in the redesign of the browser because we can serve a larger base group. We hypothesized that the intermediate user is accustomed to using the browser almost everyday, and thus has formed regular practices of browsing the web.

Results
Jakob Neilson wrote, “System designers are human and they certainly use computers, both characteristics of users. Therefore, it can be tempting for designers to trust their own intuition about user interface issues. Unfortunately, system designers are different from users in several respects, including general computer experience (and enthusiasm) and their knowledge of the conceptual foundation of the design of the system.” (http://developer.gnome.org). As the designers of the web browser, our team needed to use the data from both of the interviews to redesign a browser. At times, we were tempted to implement ideas based on our own experiences and knowledge. Sometimes though, these ideas were not supported by the data, and thus could not be used. It would have been a mistake to use personal experiences since the browser is not a system built to increase our efficiency, but rather for all ranges of users from novice to intermediate to advanced.

Some future plans and implementations would be interesting to test on users to find out about how to make browsing more efficient. Proposing to make buttons on the keyboard similar to those on the web browser, Shailendra has designed a way to make browsing even more efficient. For instance, a “Back” button on the keyboard would perform the same function as the button on the browser. Therefore, users not familiar with the keyboard shortcuts do not need to discover them to be as efficient as those who already know them. Instead, users can just push the clearly marked button on the keyboard that has been set up to perform this feature which will speed up their web browsing techniques.

Another idea that I have thought about testing would be to implement an active bar that contains links to sites that the user has just previously visited. In addition to the working toolbar, there would be an active history bar refreshing every time a new web page is viewed. Since back is the most often used button as evidenced from our interviews, having a list of previous sites that the user has been to would eliminate multiple clicks of the back button. Instead of multiple clicks, only one click is needed to visit a site that was recently viewed. By being able to see which sites that the user has visited, the drop-down arrow on the back button could be eliminated as well.

The overall goal of our project has been to create a better and more efficient web browser through the principles of contextual design. We have attempted to create a browser that is more efficient than other browsers while not drastically changing the user’s work. Through implementations such as the working toolbar and the “Search For” button, we hope to seamlessly integrate our browser into the user’s work