Mozilla's new CEO John Lilly has confirmed that three members of Humanized, an award winning UI design shop founded by Aza Raskin, son of Jef Raskin, the famous Apple designer, will be joining the Mozilla Labs team to work on Firefox and other projects. Raskin and two other unspecified Humanized employees will join Mozilla to help out with user interface design.
Humanized is perhaps best known for its desktop software design with a Quicksilver-like launcher named Enso, though the company is also responsible for the music search engine Songza, a web-based effort.
As with most who work for Labs, Lilly confirms that the new hires will work on Firefox, which has already seen vast improvements in the UI since the last official release, but will also work on other projects as well.
Given Mozilla's interest in the convergence of web apps and desktop apps through projects like Prism, perhaps the Humanized alumni will be put to work improving the interface of that fledgling effort.
Whatever they end up working on, by poaching away top designers, Mozilla is sending a clear message — the interface matters, and Firefox, already one of the more polished open source apps, will likely look even better as it ages.
[via Techcrunch]
