Hey everyone!
Thanks a lot! Because of the voting community, my submission won People’s Choice for the home tab design challenge:
http://design-challenge.mozillalabs.com/winter09/top10.php
Thanks again!
I’m working on some really cool projects, so if you want to be in touch, feel free to follow my twitter account (@kirtay).
So, in the UX index for Firefox 4.0, there’s a problem that caught my attention:
If the link you’re about to click is a binary file download (based on extension or mime type), show the file icon in the cursor when hovering. Especially useful for binary downloads + PDFs (“the land mines of the internet”, no surprises when navigating)
I’m sure many of us have had this problem – *click*, damn PDF, back, back, damn it all froze. I know I have.
Some websites add a handy tag to the link, (PDF), but that shouldn’t really be a responsibility of the site, rather the browser.
Without further ado:
I went through a couple of other concepts as well, maybe adding an icon to the corner of the cursor?
Well, the user would have to be familiar with the icon.
Maybe a small popup with the filetype? That would cover some content.
So, alerts+hover is the idea I settled with – part of the cursor, only shows on hover, doesn’t take up much screenspace.
Each filetype has a different colour, so the user (after a few uses) would easily be able to differentiate at just a glance. Learnability, I suppose?
Any feedback? The biggest problem I see is the fontsize maybe being too small: I can read it, but not sure how others feel about that? Sound off in the comments?
Ideas/Concerns
zpao: another idea, color based on how the browser will handle the link. i dont know where the support is for that, but if it’s going to be handled in window by a plugin, that’s not good. but if it’s going to prompt to download, that’s fine by me
limi suggested a pure icon approach, and it makes sense – people already recognize these icons. Here’s a mockup:
I’ve tried blogging many times.
Hopefully this one will stay. And maybe even be useful?
If anyone in the blagosphere is reading this, know any clean/simple/dark WordPress themes? I’d like something like that.