Just a quick and slightly delayed note to let you all know that after seven years I have left Igalia. It has really been an amazing, rocking place to be, and I have the best wishes for the company and its people. But whereas that was more focused on theory and academical research, this one is eminently practical: the course is structured around projects that try to go beyond the boundaries of mainstream everyday design, using many different techniques and tools to gather insights and quickly build working prototypes.
In order to have some more material to talk about, I have revisited my interactive sketch for navigating among open pages in Epiphany. To recap: the problem that we are looking into is how to manage open pages in your Web browser. This is commonly done with tabs, but these have some problems: they display very little information, are hard to use in touch screens, and scale badly.
This work looks into alternative in-app navigation among open pages that would hopefully! From the previous iteration, it seemed that a grid view might be a good solution for choosing among open pages:. You can get the code here. The other part was to encourage people to try out ideas, not just argue about them. Too much time is lost arguing when we could be showing. The key is to focus on doing just the bare minimum to portray the experience that we are interested in.
Because these sketches are quickly and cheap, they enable us to explore and discard many ideas easily. Communication of design ideas and decisions is specially complex in a distributed community like GNOME. Interactive sketches like the one here could help improve this situation.
Some time ago, I wrote a small functional prototype to explore some of the design ideas for the evolution of the GNOME Web browser maintained by my colleagues at Igalia. I thought that it would be a good idea to show these experiments to a wider public. A possible evolution of this would be to integrate bookmarks and reading lists in that overview. This first video shows the interaction as described in the current design : in the overview, open pages are shown in a horizontal list, which gets reordered so that the leftmost element in the list corresponds to the last open tab.
