Dueling Emotional Nudges Inside Firefox

Product Background

• Firefox is typically either the second or third place browser in a given market, but their latest version is beginning to make a comeback due to privacy concerns in Chrome and speed improvements in Firefox itself.

User Experience

• I was playing around with Firefox after the recent Chrome / Google auto-sign in debacle to see how the product had improved. It has improved, but not yet to the extent that I would switch from Chrome.
• The two small design touches I found nice were the emoticons that were contextually appropriate depending on Firefox’s status in the browser hierarchy on my computer.
• Firefox was happy as long as it was up to date, I’d assume that this would change to a frowny face if it became out of date.
• Firefox was unhappy that it wasn’t my default browser, again, I’d assume this changes to a happy face if you make it the default.
• This is an interesting technique - similar in a sense to using red badges to influence users to “take care of the task” to make the badge go away. Here Firefox is using emoticons to add that little additional nudge to influence user behavior.