Firefox Heatmap - How People Use Firefox's Interface

https://heatmap.mozillalabs.com/

by michael_fine • 14 years ago

45 44 14 years ago

heatmap.mozillalabs.com

bonzoesc• 14 years ago

The first thing that jumps out at me there is the use of the vertical scroll bar and back button, instead of hardware scrollers and back buttons.

tommymorgan2• 14 years ago

What jumped out at me was the 71% for the reload button. Unless they've changed the layout since I customized my copy, the reload button defaults to being a tiny button at the right end of the awesome bar. I moved mine to where Chrome has it and these numbers indicate that a lot of others have done the same. That or Mozilla moved it and I naturally didn't notice.

mbrubeck5• 14 years ago

The default location of the reload button changed in Firefox 4 beta a couple months after this study:

http://mozillalinks.org/2010/09/unified-stop-reload-go-butto...

tommymorgan2• 14 years ago

The scroll bar numbers make me further believe that OS X Lion's scroll bars are a bad design. My computer is not a tablet... saving ~10 of 1920 pixels is not something I needed or wanted.

todd3834• 14 years ago

The OS X Lion scrollbars, or lack of clunky scrollbars, has dramatically improved the design of so many webpages IMHO.

Tyr422• 14 years ago

I have turned my scrollbars back on, not because I want to use them, but because I want to look and see how much of a page is left without moving my mouse over there. I never actually click on it.

moonboots• 14 years ago

Ubuntu Unity has some neat tricks to make scrollbars more usable [1]. Instead of requiring users to hone in on the up/down arrows or the "thumb", hovering anywhere near the scrollbar brings up a widget that compactly encapsulates all this functionality. I don't care for Unity enough to start using it day to day, but this feature struck me as clever though radical.

streptomycin• 14 years ago

Wait, that's supposed to be more usable than the status quo?

jay_kyburz• 14 years ago

Yeah, don't people use their mouse wheel or two finger scrolling on the trackpad?

idleloops7• 14 years ago

I use the side of the touchpad if needed.

I'd recommend avoiding scrolling as much as you can. I prefer myself to page with the space bar - well at least on web pages. It's much nicer. (Shift and Space to go back up.)

Scrolling is tiring, in that it requires me having to do a lot of eye tracking.

idleloops7• 14 years ago

I notice this all the time with your 'normal' user. The scroll bar is quite possibly the most horrific unfriendly control. It's just too narrow. Those users that don't have that much control of a pointer, struggle with scroll bars and small buttons / drop downs etc.

I like the Apple way of placing controls on the left, but having a scroll bar on the right negates a lot of the benefit of doing so.

Having said that they are quite handy as page length / where you are indicators.

dbbolton• 14 years ago

I'm assuming that they only tracked mouse usage, but I would assume many "advanced" users would make extensive use of the default keyboard shortcuts. I wonder if it could skew the data.

nfm• 14 years ago

Interesting, but note that it's a 2010 study. See also https://testpilot.mozillalabs.com/testcases/betaui

MattDL• 14 years ago

I think the only UI features I regularly use are the Firefox button and the URL bar.

Everything else has been replaced either by hardware buttons (back/forward/scrolling/new tab) or by extensions (reload with mouse gestures etc.)

As has already been said the use of the scroll bar especially seems odd to me, I'd have thought middle clicking would have nearly killed it off.

idleloops7• 14 years ago

Try CTRL + L to jump into the location bar (that's if you have a keyboard.)

With regard to middle clicking, I assume you mean a scroll wheel on a mouse. Which some users still don't have! (I know it seems hard to believe.) Also trackpad users need to dupe this functionality somehow, and some haven't picked up on the shortcuts.

51Cards• 14 years ago

If I read this correctly under Customizations: 95% use the "Status Bar" (though in which way is unclear) Yet the status bar was removed from the default UI with the argument that the space was wasted. (and replaced with the optional Add-On bar, taking up the same space)

Easier to have just provided the option to hide the Status bar for the 5%?

kbuck• 14 years ago

This may be due to settings carrying over from an older Firefox install. In my experience, Firefox has been quite good at not clobbering settings unless they decide to remove the feature entirely. I had forgotten they added "tabs on top" until I saw this, which actually reminded me to try it out.

mbrubeck5• 14 years ago

This was based on an old study from Firefox 4 Beta when the status bar was still on by default. (The study was in July 2010, when Firefox 4.0b1 was out; the status bar was replaced about four months later in Firefox 4.0b7.)

The "Customizations" number just means that 95% of users had the status bar enabled (i.e., did nothing and ended up with with the default setting) while the other 5% customized Firefox by disabling the status bar. It says nothing about how many users "used" (interacted with) the status bar.

Customization is not a good measure of usefulness. We know that 97% of participants never used the RSS button in the main toolbar in Firefox 4.0b1, but that doesn't mean that they all took the time to customize their toolbar to remove the button.

ngokevin• 14 years ago

Disable the navigation bar, and alt+d brings up a navigation window. No more using the mouse to click on a skinny rectangle, and you get some screen real-estate.

DigitalSea• 14 years ago

Looks like it's time to get rid off the navigate to visit URL button like Chrome did, nobody uses it. Interesting to see so many people use the search field in the browser, don't think I've ever used that before to do a search I search via the URL bar.

zobzu• 14 years ago

Based on over 117,000 Windows 7 and Vista Test Pilot submissions from 7 days in July 2010

It's the old 2010 study...

mbrubeck5• 14 years ago

You can find results from the more recent 2012 heatmap study here:

https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2012/06/firefox-heatmap-study-20...

FiloSottile• 14 years ago

No, I can't believe that the URL box is used more than the search one. Thre must be an error or, more probably, a bias towards tech-savvy people. I've seen common people typing full URLs in the Google box.

ch00• 14 years ago

The data is from FF4 beta. So I think you're right, these are not your average users.

mbrubeck5• 14 years ago

You're right about the bias. If you use the filters to view only data from self-identified "Beginner" users, then the address bar usage is significantly lower and the search bar usage is higher (but still not as high as the address bar).

notJim2• 14 years ago

Could it be that people search using the URL box? It's the biggest, most familiar box, so maybe beginners users just type into it.

dfc• 14 years ago

What is the "firefox button"? Does this exist in the linux versions?

mbrubeck5• 14 years ago

The Firefox button is shown when the menubar is hidden (View: Toolbars: Menu Bar, on Linux). The menubar is hidden by default on Windows Vista and Windows 7.

On Windows the Firefox button is orange and is integrated into the window's titlebar. This is not yet implemented on Linux, so on Linux it just appears in the tab bar.

zalew• 14 years ago

exactly. I use it on my laptop (linux) to save space.

techmm• 14 years ago

Beta testers are not typical users!

SCdF• 14 years ago

I know this is an old study, but I'm amazing at how many people use the back button. I wonder if that's how a lot of people deal with search results that didn't pan out (they hit back to go to Google, instead of opening them in a bunch of tabs).

nl• 14 years ago

It is interesting that the percentage of people using the back button decreases with expertise (98% for beginner vs 92% for advanced).

I find it more amazing how many people use the forward button. I think I've probably used the forward button less than 10 times in the 18 years I've been using the web.

To the 60% of users who use it - when do you find it useful?

sukuriant• 14 years ago

"derp, pressed back too much"

"wait, what was that page I was just on?"

"wait, did that page really say that?"

idleloops7• 14 years ago

The forward button breaks if you fork. Perhaps the browser would be better to lay a breadcrumb trail.

notJim2• 14 years ago

I'm a web developer, and I use the back and forward buttons* all the time, especially if I'm being lazy. For example, if I'm shopping for something, rather than opening a whole bunch of tabs, I'll just bounce back and forth using forward and back. I think I do this especially when I'm farther away from what I want, and as I start to zero in more, I start opening more tabs at once so I can compare.

Also, from some usability studies we've done at my job, it seems that most people are almost completely unable to deal with window management. We rolled out functionality for a while that broke the back button (poorly-implemented infinite scroll) and found that our pages performed very poorly, because people would lose their place and just leave. We kind of had assumed that most people would use tabs, but that turned out not to be the case at all.

Anecdotally, watching my mom use the computer recently was enlightening. She's been using computers longer than I have, and is very savvy with certain things (e.g., she still knows how to use Excel to solve problems better than I do, and I know Excel pretty damn well.) She seems to use browser tabs sort of like "processes", rather than "threads". For example, she'll have her "hotel search" tab, her "rental car" tab, and her "flight search" tab, and within those tabs, she'll stick to that topic, using the back buttons to look at different pages. When I switched spots with her, and started spawning a whole bunch of tabs from each tab, she started to lose track of things.

* Edit: actually, I almost never use the buttons themselves, but I use the functionality as I described. I use mouse buttons, gestures or shortcut keys, rather than the buttons.

ticks• 14 years ago

Your mother sounds like she's using tabs like you would in Excel, where you have different spreadsheets for different types of transactions. You see that quite a lot with users who are experts in one area and try to carry over their skills to another area - rather than adapting to new ideas.

As for forward and back, yeah I use them a lot too. Normally via extra mouse buttons or keyboard though.

idleloops7• 14 years ago

Try the one tab test! You might find it's less distracting.

justindocanto2• 14 years ago

Anybody else having the overlay about 30 pixels higher than the image of the browser? or is it just me.

Tyr422• 14 years ago

I am. Chrome on OSX. I'm not sure if that's intentional so you can see what exactly was being clicked on, or a bug.

justindocanto2• 14 years ago

74% of advance users used the search bar VS 54% of beginners using it. Wonder why.

adrianp• 14 years ago

What strikes me is the low usage of the RSS button; the "RSS is dead" polemic might not be that unsubstantiated after all.

Firefox Heatmap - How People Use Firefox's Interface

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