Hi! I’m Tina Hsieh, the UX designer in charge of the Firefox Preferences (or “Options” on Windows) redesign. The Preferences team is launching a few great changes in Preferences starting from Firefox 56. Exciting, right? Then you probably will be interested in knowing what we’ve done to create our brand new Preferences redesign.

As we started looking into Firefox, we noticed that our Preferences has been lacking love for a while. The user research result from project Onboarding shows that not only advanced users visit Preferences for customizing their Firefox, but also some first-time users go directly to Preferences for playing around with cool stuff. Since one of our design principles is “Adaptable”, which means we care about giving control of the entire browser experience to each of our users. Therefore, the goal of the Firefox Preferences redesign is to make our Preferences much easier for users to understand how to configure their Firefox to fulfill their specific needs.

Problem identification

The eight categories in Firefox 55

After reviewing the old information architecture (IA), we had some questions about the eight categories. Could users go directly to what they’re looking for? Would they get lost in our structure? Are the text labels straightforward enough for them to understand? Before kicking-off the redesign project, we conducted a pilot Treejack test and validated the problems.