I’ve been exploring some interesting concepts with how you start a web application. When you want to start a traditional application you use either the “Start Menu” in Windows or the “Dock” in OSX, Ubuntu also has a start menu approach.
When you want to start a web-application, you first launch the web-browser-application, then you launch the actual web application that you want. Gmail, Flickr, LinkedIn, etc.
There are two itneresting projects going on at Firefox that relate to this.
- The first is called Prism. This will allow web-application to live in traditional launch points on the desktop.
- The second is called Places. This is a redesign of basic bookmarking functionality.
According to the Firefox page about 39% of website visits are to previous pages. This means that people keep going back to the same things over and over.I took a look at the current Places design for Firefox and I thought that it doesn’t address this problem. The current Places design has a menu that allows users to quickly get access to sub-menus of recent places or frequent places. While this design addresses some of the problems it causes users to menu surf. It also creates a stronger seperation between starting a web-application and starting a traditional application.
My proposal is to begin to bring these two worlds together and make launching a web-site more like launching a traditional application. Using this approach will tie nicely into the Prism world allowing applications to be “Pinned” as a promoted desktop application.
The current places design is shown first followed by my start menu concept:
Your concept is better than the current design, obviously capitalizing on the knowledge that people go to a handful of sites all the time, so it makes sense to keep the number of clicks (or menus in this case) down. You should drop them an email with this suggestion
Personally, I’m not a fan of menus at all. I’m using Safari at the moment and have a bunch of link folders in my bookmarks bar at the top, when clicked, these drop down in a similar fashion — however, I actually prefer the Firefox bookmarks sidebar to this. I think it makes a lot more sense to display bookmarks in the sidebar because of the way the space is utilized, and even if you have a lot of bookmarks you can easily access any of them with just 1 click if the sidebar is open.
I’m curious, in your suggestion, if you click say.. on the Gmail link, are you envisaging a new Prism window being opened, or the application simply loaded in the current view? I like Prism mainly because it hides all the browser controls as I understand, which are irrelevant to the web application itself. There’s also an application for OS X called Fluid: http://fluidapp.com/ – allows you to add web applications to the Dock, and launch each one in its own browser window.
Interestingly, Mozilla ended up doing something rather similar to your idea, but one better. Instead of putting the “Search Recent Places” in a submenu that takes 2 clicks just to start entering text, that idea was put into the location bar that integrates searching history and bookmarks along with the old functionality of entering the location.
James – while the address bar is less clicks it’s also less discoverable for new users. There’s no reason why you couldn’t do both.