Mozilla Firefox
Designing a year-end experience for 141M+ users to celebrate their yearly milestones
Timeline
Sept 2024 - May 2025
Team
4 Designers (Visual, UX, Motion)
3 PMs & Mentors
Responsibilities/Contributions
Led year-end experience strategy, framing the design direction and facilitating workshops that shifted the team from traditional UX tactics to a more exploratory, experimental approach.
Conducted user research by analyzing Firefox’s research repository and synthesizing insights to inform design decisions.
Led workshops on creating data stories, guiding the team in shaping compelling narratives from complex datasets.
Created visual design artifacts and final mockups using Acorn design system guidelines to ensure consistency and quality.
Defined motion direction by visualizing how transitions and animations should behave to enhance clarity and engagement.
TL;DR
An early-stage campaign concept for Firefox, like Spotify Wrapped, but for your Firefox browser, turning browsing behavior into a personal, story-driven experience.
Note: This case study is not about a typical UX process. Instead, this project explores how design can turn everyday digital moments into a personal story, like building Spotify Wrapped, but for your Firefox browser.
Disclaimer
Due to NDA constraints, I can share the initial draft of designs, but not the specific outcomes or findings from each phase, happy to walk through my process and thinking, though.
Context
Firefox Recap:
A year-end campaign is an engaging experience designed to celebrate the users of Firefox. The experience allows users to view their browsing journey during the year.
Business & Design Goal
Craft a delightful year-end browsing experience to help stabilize the annual dip in active users, a trend that typically happens when people switch to new devices and default to pre-installed browsers. Firefox has been experiencing a steady decline in its active users due to various reasons.
More Context
But how can a year-end experience drive such KPIs like active users and other engagement metrics?
Year-end experiences boost engagement by reactivating users, increasing interactions, and amplifying sharing. A great example of a successful year-end campaign is Spotify Wrapped, Sensor Tower estimates that it drives a 16–21% boost in Spotify app downloads, significantly impacting KPIs like retention, engagement, and user growth. In contrast, the primary goal for Firefox’s year-end experience was not to chase immediate KPI spikes, but to focus on delivering a thoughtful, engaging, and privacy-respecting experience that reinforces user loyalty over time.
Firefox Recap Process
This kind of experience doesn’t follow a traditional UX process. Instead, it requires continuous experimentation and iteration, using feedback to shape something that feels genuinely engaging and personal to users.
This called for a continuous, emotion-driven evaluation approach, focused on how the experience made users feel, not just how it functioned.
Study the
market
Define the
product's uniqueness
Identify relevant
user data
Turn them into
data stories
Visual
Storytelling
Iterations based on
user feedback
Approach
Designing a year-end experience required a unique approach that was filled with experiments.
Here's how the entire approach unfolded:
Understanding year-end campaigns & studying competitors.
Since year-end campaigns aren’t typical product features, following a standard UX playbook wouldn’t be enough. To build the right foundation, I started by conducting a competitive audit of more than 18 campaigns across industries including Spotify Wrapped, Duolingo Year in Review, Strava Year in Sport, and Google Year in Search.Here's how the entire approach unfolded:
What makes year-end campaigns feel personal and shareable?
What risks or failures have other brands faced in these campaigns?
How do other brands turn data into stories that users care about?
Can the same strategies work for Firefox’s privacy-first, multi-purpose browsing?
Recapping browsing is harder, it’s not just music, fitness, or learning. It’s everything.
While other brands like Spotify or Strava focus on a single domain, music or fitness, browsing is far more complex. Firefox users browse everything from news and research to entertainment and shopping, across multiple devices and platforms. This made defining what to recap and how to tell that story especially tricky.
To tackle this, I turned to Firefox’s internal research library to dig deeper into:
How do users browse across devices?
What tasks do users perform most?
What keeps users coming back?
What telemetry or other user data do we have access to?
This deep dive helped in shaping the experience by:
Ground the experience in realistic, privacy-safe data, identify relatable behaviors worth celebrating, and filter out any data that might trigger negative emotions or feel uncomfortable to revisit.
Turning raw user data into meaningful data points.
Once I had a clear view of what data was available and privacy-safe, the next step was to identify which data points could actually create value in a year-end story. Not all data is worth turning into a story. This phase helped me filter out the noise and focus on the moments to build a story that celebrates users without overwhelming them with irrelevant details.
Filtering the available data to surface what could be counted or framed as a “moment” or “achievement”. (e.g. number of tabs opened, most active browsing days)
Backing each data point with a reason for why it mattered. Would this celebrate something meaningful? Would this reinforce Firefox’s brand values?
Avoiding filler stats that might feel meaningless or overwhelming.
A snapshot of organized chaos in FigJam, but where all the good ideas started. The brainstorming wasn’t clean, but it was exactly what was needed to figure things out.
Forming data stories.
After having a set of meaningful, privacy-respecting data points, the next challenge was to transform them into stories that felt personal, thoughtful, and fun, not just stats on a screen.
Questioning each data point:
What does this say about the user? Would this feel good to see?Framed it with tone and context:
Rewrote dry stats into personality-driven lines that felt fun and respectful.Sequenced for emotional flow:
Arranged the stories to feel like a light journey, welcoming, surprising, and positive at the end.
Motion Design and Copywriting are crucial in delivering such an experience.
To make the experience personal, memorable, and shareable, copywriting and motion design played a central role, not just as afterthoughts, but as integral design decisions from the start.
Explored UX copywriting to humanize data points and make the experience feel more personal. This is what the writing should feel like.
Designing a unique visual library mixed with Firefox's existing design system.
Created a dedicated visual library tailored specifically to the needs of the Firefox Recap.
Mockups
Next Steps
How could such an experience be tested and seen how are the users perceiving it?
Perception-focused testing sessions, where users explore the flow without interruption, followed by reflective questions to capture emotional and narrative impact. Since Firefox Recap is more about emotional resonance than task completion, a reflective testing approach could be a valuable method. Users could explore the experience uninterrupted, and then respond to open-ended questions to uncover how it made them feel, what stood out, and whether it came across as personal and meaningful.
Learnings
Here's a reflection on working on such an open-ended challenge.
