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Aurora: Design Themes

By Jesse James Garrett August 4, 2008

Of all the ideas we talked about while designing Aurora, we kept coming back to a core set we considered essential, high-priority elements of the browser. These ideas clustered around four major themes:

Context awareness: Is there another product that has the potential to know as much about us as the web browser? Not only does the browser touch every aspect of our lives — our work, families, social connections, entertainment — but the data that flows through it is so semantically rich. If the browser paid attention to all that data, and also paid attention to our behavior as we interact with that data, it could find patterns and adapt itself to ease the difficulty of managing our interactions with the Web. Add to that the ability of the browser to be aware of your physical context, and the possibilities expand even further.

Natural interaction: Most of our interaction with technology involves levels of abstraction. Windows, menus, and toolbars are notional objects bearing little resemblance to real ones. The trouble is that dealing with all these abstractions is hard work, cognitively. The brain really wants to interact with a familiar system: the real world. So we designed Aurora to leverage natural interactions wherever possible, with objects in space or those with a sense of physics to them. The Mozilla team liked this approach as well: one of the core Aurora concepts, the spatial view, has already found its way into some of the work Mozilla is doing for Firefox Mobile.

Continuity: Another area that both Mozilla and Adaptive Path were keenly interested in exploring was the idea of continuity of the browser experience. We didn’t want to design different interfaces for desktop, handheld, and wall-mounted devices. We wanted to come up with a single, consistent interaction model that could apply no matter what size screen you were using, or what means of interacting with the device (mouse, touchscreen, gestural controller) you had at your disposal. Also, we wanted to explore how the Web experience could be seamless across devices — so people could move from one context to another, always picking up right where they left off.

Multi-user applications: The Web is something that people use together. But the browser has historically been a single-user application. A browser built with multi-user applications in mind could provide a platform for much of the functionality we now see being re-implemented and reinvented on a site-by-site basis. Collaborating simultaneously in a common space, sharing information with others, and recombining or remixing elements from the Web all become common, assumed functions of any website.

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