Idea Town
Welcome to Idea Town
Idea Town is an opt-in platform that allows us to perform controlled tests of new high-visibility product concepts in the general release channel of Firefox.
Idea Town is not intended to replace trains for most features, nor is it a test bed for concepts we do not believe have a strong chance of shipping in general release. Rather, it is reserved for features that require user-feedback, testing, and tuning before they ship with the browser.
Goals
Primary Goal
- Idea town will let us take larger risks with product concepts, giving us a cheap avenue to test and validate product concepts.
Secondary Goals
- Idea Town will create a service for Firefox users interested in trying out cutting edge features.
- Idea Town will normalize the process for testing and iterating on new UI/UX in the browser.
- Idea Town will provide a stable channel to measure user interest in potential Firefox features.
- Idea Town will establish a richer relationship for users with Firefox/Firefox Accounts.
- Idea Town will introduce a new viral component into browser development.
- Idea town will empower Firefox UX to propose and validate product concepts with a large audience.
Milestones
Tentative Summary
- Milestone 1A: Launch Idea Town internally
- Milestone 1B: Publicly launch teaser site
- Milestone 2: Release Idea Town to the public
Milestone 1A
December 2015 Coming soon
Milestone 1B
December 2015 Coming soon
Milestone 2
Q1 2016 Coming soon
Developing Idea Town Add-ons
Coming soon
Available Services (preliminary)
An opinionated hosting platform for addons is being designed. It will be easy and fast to deploy code to production and will likely include these features:
- centralized logging / metric services (TBD)
- logging (mozlog => stdout => elasticsearch/kibana)
- statsd (dogstatsd)
- service hosting (docker => ?? elastic beanstalk, aws)
- includes a SQL database (mysql or posgresql)
Resources
Repos
User Experience
User Stories
People
Product Owner
- Nick Chapman
User Experience
- John Gruen
- Bryan Bell
Engineering
- Jared Hirsch
- Les Orchard
- Dave Justice
Communication
- email list (email to subscribe): idea-town-all@mozilla.com
- irc: #ideatown