Design decisions
Posted on Saturday, September 27, 2008 by Thijs Jacobs
Before publicly releasing Juice, we’d like to share with you some of our design decisions related to our exciting new browser plugin. Plenty of healthy challenges abound when designing a plugin, as we try to come up with a design that works and conveys a large amount of information in a confined space. Juice is designed to be as non-intrusive as possible, but we want to make sure that, even when the user hides our Juice sidebar, we’re still able to alert the user when our intelligent discovery engine finds new information.
When the Juice sidebar is hidden, our main communication interface with the user is our icon in the browser’s navigation bar. The icon itself is designed to convey four different application states: an idle state, a loading state (a cycle of 5 separate images), a discovery state and an open state.
Traditionally, this 32 pixel piece of icon real estate (in the case of most modern browsers) is rarely used and we wanted to tackle the challenge of alerting the user, without using any pop-ups, words or sounds. At the same time, we tried to stay as close as possible to our Juice mantra of “squeezing” the web. The final result, nicknamed the “Mexican”, is a rich and compelling icon set, using both animation and bright orange colors to indicate state changes. We hope you’ll like, and hopefully love, our “Mexican”, as much as we do!
As a bonus, we’re giving away 50 invites to Juice; unlock code: juiceblog
The final icon design is the work of our excellent designer Frank Müller.