Thursday, January 19, 2012

Infusing the Web with Play

Last week, the Mozilla Foundation crew held an All Hands. For the uninitiated, an All Hands is where everyone from the whole organization gets together and does mini design sprints on different topics and projects. This is super important for us at Mozilla because it gives our teams- who often are all over various parts of the world working remotely, a chance to have some much needed face to face time.

One of our sessions was focused on our potential future website at the Mozilla Foundation. With our new focus this year on really engaging different kinds of webmakers in authentic project based learning experiences, we were asked to envision what the landing page of our new site could look like. My team- which included Dan Sinker and Geoffrey MacDougall did a ton of brainstorming- but ultimately we landed on the idea that a user should be able to immediately come to our site and be able to make something.  Here is a sketch of what we came up with:


The basic concept here is that we offer our user various opportunities to make something with our web properties and tools. The "wheel" which is an homage to a wonder wheel or something that you would see at an amusement park or game show- is actually an interactive filter. I feel that although this might not be the end result, what is nice about this prototype is that it immediately evokes the idea of play or fun.  Sometimes we get so focused in filling our websites with information, that we lose the chance to highlight our core values and voice. I think that our mock up speaks with our voice and although there will be hopefully many iterations and other ideas, I hope that we always keep to our ultimate goal of empowering people to learn something through making something that they are passionate about.