Community Survey Blog

Today we’re closing the series about the SUMO survey with a post about the last question of the survey:

What resources make or would make the user-to-user support in your language more effective?

We already saw the average responses to this question in one of our previous post in the series. Here there are again:

As you can see, resources based on text were ranked higher than any others. On the other hand, Instant Messaging or Tutorial videos were ranked much lower, ending slightly above ‘Neutral’. It might be interesting to see what impact on these results had the profile of the survey takers. Thanks to the demographic variable that we discussed previously, we were able to learn how each profile responded to the question.

The above chart shows how many respondents of each profile took the survey. 19% of the survey takers were end-users and 32% were community members actively contributing to the project. Is it possible that the responses given by advanced users (who were more numerous) outweigh those of end-users in this question? What preferences do the end-users have and, consequently, what is the best way to improve their support experience?

In order to compare the average responses between the user profiles, we reduced the number of analyzed variables from 10 to 3, by means of factor analysis. The new extracted variables were:

• Textual support, representing:

Tutorials/How-to’s
Troubleshooting articles
Forums

• Visual support, representing:

Screenshots
Screencasts/videos

• Interactive support, representing:

Live Chat
IM
VoIP

Average values of these new variables are visualized in the following chart.

We clearly notice that the end-users are much less enthusiastic towards textual support, and in the same time they prefer interactive help slightly more than other users. The visual support has been similarly rated across all user profiles (the differences weren’t statistically significant—hence the grey color in the chart).

In summary, thanks to the factor analysis, it was possible to make the comparison of preferences between user profiles easier. It turned out that even though the interactive resources, such as Instant Messaging and LiveChat, were ranked lowest by all respondents, there were significant differences between user profiles in the responses. We learned that the end-users favor textual support much less than other groups and show a slight preference of the interactive support.

Good support is an essential part of the product experience in its holistic approach. It is even more important for end-users who may be even using the product for the first time. This is why it was important for us to see what this particular group though about Mozilla support experience. Our study may serve to confirm that indeed the introduction of LiveChat on support.mozilla.com was a valuable addition which will help users looking for support.

* * *

This is our last post in the series about the SUMO survey. The series included:

• the first post, in which we presented the objectives of the survey and the questions,
• the second post, in which we discussed who the survey takers where and what languages they spoke,
• the third post, in which we analyzed the overall average responses and dove into the differences between the user profiles,
• the fourth post, in which we focused on the differences between locales,
• and this post, the fifth one, in which we looked closer at the responses to the last questions of the survey.

We hope you liked the series and found the data as fascinating as we did. We encourage you to post your thoughts in the comments or join us on #surveys on irc.mozilla.org.

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