

In an effort to better understand how people use the web, Mozilla has launched a new data gathering project for usability studies called Test Pilot. It's still just a concept, but as an aggregation model, it shows great promise.

Test Pilot is sort of a distributed usability lab. It uses simple crowdsourcing mechanisms to gather data from volunteers all over the world as they interact with web apps and desktop software. The collected data remains transparent and openly available, so the data sets can be used by anyone.

Volunteers will be invited to download a Firefox extension, which will ask for some demographic information – age, location, your level of technical aptitude – that's used to build a profile. Based on that profile, you'll occasionally receive a request to take part in a usability study. Click "yes," complete the survey or click around on a website for a few minutes, and the Test Pilot add-on will gather the information it needs.

The tests will be unobtrusive, and the data will be collected anonymously. The user profiles will remain anonymous, too, so they won't contain any information that would allow anyone to directly link data collected from your browser back to you.

Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla Labs, outlined the details of the proposed platform in a blog post Tuesday.

Raskin notes that the project was initially intended to provide feedback for Mozilla's own products – Firefox, the Thunderbird e-mail client and add-ons like Weave and Ubiquity – with a 1% sample of active users. That's a huge sample size for usability testing, so the distributed model makes sense.

It's also this level of scalability that makes Test Pilot special. Not only will the collected data be made open to the public, but the testing platform will as well. Any research institution that needs usability data can draft a request to query the hive mind of worldwide Firefox users. Tests can be conducted in a matter of hours with virtually no overhead – a dream compared to the hours and days spend recruiting, screening and testing participants in traditional usability studies.

"Test Pilot is open and transparent," Raskin says in an e-mail to Wired.com. "Anyone can submit a test to be run for research. We are particularly excited that this enables new communities, like non-profits, ethnographers, and usability researchers, to participate in making the open web better. Simply put, Test Pilot's doors are open as long as the data gathered by a test protects our user's privacy and furthers Mozilla's mission to help people work, play, and communicate on the web."

Raskin is quick to point out that the project isn't intended to be a generic platform for market research.

"Test Pilot is specifically scoped towards usability and feature research," he says.

Don't expect the tight focus on usability to limit innovation, though.

Consider a project like IBM's Many Eyes, which aggregates public data and catalogs it in freely available data sets. IBM's team also experiments with new forms of data visualization. Given the Firefox community's obsession with things like layout rendering, cutting edge animation techniques and fancy JavaScript frills, visualization tools seem like a logical extension of the platform. The potential for growth and experimentation in that area alone is enormous.

I'm looking forward to downloading the add-on myself. Do you suppose there's a shortage of 30-something white male Firefox users in the San Francisco bay area?

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