January 12, 2012

Rolling Out & Testing a Content Rich Universal Tab

With 200+ sites, 150 blogs and many other various web properties, the Mozilla universe is massive and can be difficult to navigate.

Roughly a year ago, a few Mozillians (David Boswell, Potch, Sean Martell and John Slater) got together to come up with a solution to unify all Mozilla properties: a universal tab that, when clicked, would expand to expose navigational links across all key sites.

A lot of you have probably become pretty familiar with the grey tab in the upper right corner of Mozilla sites, and from a branding perspective it’s been helpful identifying Mozilla properties. We’re excited to roll out the next phase of the universal tab as part of the One Mozilla project.

Universal Tab, Version A.

Universal Tab, Version B.

High-Level Content Map

You might be wondering, how did these items make the cut? Well, we’ve spent a lot of time auditing Mozilla websites, traffic and user patterns, and have come up with a first pass of a high-level content map. Right now it’s organized into four major areas, but it will surely evolve based on A-B testing, usage trends and of course your input (which is what this post is all about).

Mozilla - Where users will find the most up-to-date and useful content about Mozilla

mission —> http://www.mozilla.org/about/mission.html
about —>http://www.mozilla.org/about
products —>http://www.mozilla.org/products
MDN —> https://developer.mozilla.org

Products - Will feature links to Mozilla’s major (and currently expanding) product lines, like Firefox, Thunderbird, Apps and BrowserID.

Firefox —> http://mozilla.org/firefox
Thunderbird —> http://mozilla.org/thunderbird
Apps (coming soon!)
Browser ID (coming soon!)

Innovations - Where we’ll feature special projects like WebFwd, Labs, and soon Betafarm

Webfwd —> http://webfwd.org
Labs —> http://mozillalabs.com
Betafarm —> http://betafarm.mozillalabs.com

Get Involved - Links to key ways that people can support Mozilla, by volunteering, becoming a paid employee, making a donation, and more.

Volunteer with us —> http://www.mozilla.org/contribute/
Work —>http://careers.mozilla.org (new site coming soon!)
Find us —>http://www.mozilla.org/about/mozilla-spaces/
Join us —> http://donate.mozilla.org
Learn more —> http://www.mozilla.org/contribute/

The website directory will link to http://www.mozilla.org/community/ and we’ll be doing a lot more work to provide a comprehensive sitemap along with the interactive visualization in 2012 (hooray!).

Promotional Space

This will be a spot to feature a specific project or campaign, and may either pull in data from our about:home snippets or use specially created content.

Next Steps

As noted earlier, this is just a first pass…we really want to get your input before we roll anything out. Is anything missing? Is everything in the right place? Of course we can’t feature every Mozilla site here, but if done right each of these links ought to at least help users get to the sites that will be most useful to them. If you have suggestions, please let us know in the comments section.
Once we get your input, we’ll iterate and then post a test version of the tab in the next few weeks. Initially it’ll only be used for a small % of incoming traffic, but the data on how it’s used will help us continue to refine it. Then, once we’re happy with the content, we’ll make sure it’s ready for responsive design on all devices, and are aiming for a full rollout by the end of March 2012.

Beyond that, we’ll get this fully localized and create a delivery solution (maybe an iframe) so it can easily be used by all Mozillians. We also hope to improve the relevance by adding dynamic information depending on where a user is coming from.

Thanks!

Sean Martell, lead designer
Steven Garrity, developer
David Boswell, tour guide
You, feedback & help with iteration

Filed under one mozilla navigation universal tab sean martell