Improvements Have Arrived at Firefox.com

Ken Kovash    plans, results    

Previously, we’ve briefly touched on our long-term roadmap for optimization of Mozilla’s web sites and our users’ experience on them.  There are many facets of “optimization”, from design related decision making processes, to improved user experiences, to improved download conversion rates.  As an early step in our longer term plan, David Rolnitzky recently led an effort tackling one significant low hanging fruit – providing relevant content to visitors of the main Firefox product page based on their browser.

Prior to running this test, we saw about 400,000 daily visits to this page, about 75% of whom were on another browser (e.g., IE) and about 25% of whom were existing Firefox users.  Delivering tailored content to IE visitors and a different set of content to existing Firefox users seems intuitive, right?  Based on David’s findings, visitors to the test pages agreed.  The download conversion rate of IE visitors increased slightly, and the experience of existing Firefox users seemed to improve as well.  The ultimate impact?  An improved web site experience for upwards of two million users (new or existing) annually.

Please check out David’s post and let us know what you think.

Why People Don’t Install Firefox – Part III

Ken Kovash    plans, results    

In Part I we discussed a framework around understanding the Firefox user experience at the moment a person installs Firefox.  In Part II we walked though our recent initiative – soliciting feedback from users when canceling out of the installer – and provided some high-level results.  With Part III we now want to dive into the details of the written feedback provided by users and discuss how these insights will translate into decisions, actions and next steps.

As we highlighted last time, about 330 users left feedback.  The vast majority of people also provided a written comment (which was not required).  In looking at the dashboard, there are some interesting pieces of information – e.g., most cancellations occur at step #2 of the installer, the two most common categories of responses were “Installation Problem > Other” and “I’m Confused > Didn’t Understand Instructions.”  While these findings are definitely useful, we found that the holy grail of this exercise turned out to be the written comments from users.

Here are some example comments:

“i already had the latest version of firefox installed! there should be something that tells you on the website that you have the latest version before the installer is downloaded”

“It keeps telling me to close firefox and it is closed..I even went to the task manager to be sure there wasn’t one running that i couldn’t see…”

“I do not have administrative rights”

“telling me i don’t have access to write to the installation directory and i don’t know what the installation directory is or how to change it”

Going through each individual comment, we decided to categorize them to see if there were any overarching experiences encountered by users.  Taking the top five most common experiences, here is a breakdown of what users cited:

Clearly, there are two key issues that have been uncovered:

• Firefox not exiting/closing cleanly (e.g., a zombie process)
• Directory location issues for non-admin users

Where do we go from here?

The Firefox product team is already discussing solutions to remedy these two problems.  This is perhaps the best example we’ve seen of data+insights driving decisions and actions.

In addition, we’re eager to hear your thoughts.  Perhaps there are some key insights we’ve missed in our analysis.  There is a lot of valuable information that’s come out of this initiative and there’s probably more that we can be doing here (seeking feedback from users when they’re encountering pain points) in the future.

Why People Don’t Install Firefox – Part II

Ken Kovash    process, results    

As we described a few days ago, we recently shipped a modified version of Firefox with a different installer – one allowing users to leave feedback upon canceling.  In Part II of this series, we want to outline exactly what users saw and share some high-level findings.  An examination of users’ written feedback – and a discussion around associated insights, implications and next steps – will soon be coming in Part III.

What are all the steps of the Firefox installer (Windows)?  Where exactly can a user hit “cancel”? (Please click below for the full image)

When a user clicked “cancel”, what exactly did he/she see? (Please note that clicking on any sub-category, such as “Taking too long”, opens up a free form feedback box for the user to write their comments)

What were the high-level results from this feedback form?

Below is a screenshot from Kampyle’s dashboard (click for full image).  Kampyle, a start-up making huge strides within the analytics world, helped Mozilla with this initiative by hosting the feedback form you see above.  You’ll notice a few high-level pieces of info:

• What was the average sentiment/feeling of people upon canceling?
• How many total people left feedback?  (Answer: about 5,000 people hit the feedback form and about 330 left feedback)
• What were the most common “categories” of feedback left by users (i.e., types of problems cited)?
• What steps within the Firefox installer saw the most users abandoning?  And what was the feedback breakdown for each of these steps?

In our next post, we’ll dive into the free form feedback left by users (where we can more clearly identify a couple critical trouble spots) and discuss what it all means for possible product and/or marketing changes in the future.

Stay tuned!

People in the Philippines Love Firefox

Ken Kovash    Uncategorized, results    

After previously reaching this milestone in Indonesia, Slovenia, Macedonia, and (most recently) Bosnia Herzegovina, Firefox has now surpassed 50% market share in two more regions – Slovakia and the Philippines.  These numbers come from Net Applications’ March 2009 report (note: regional breakdowns require a subscription).

As we noted a few months back, the important metric to follow is the *trending* of the numbers, versus the absolute numbers/levels themselves (see here for a full description of market share methodologies).  With that approach, Firefox has seen continued rapid growth across many regions – since November, we’ve picked up more than 3% in Hungary, the Philippines, Poland, and Bosnia Herzegovina, along with an astounding 5% in Indonesia and Macedonia.

A big round of applause is due to the entire Mozilla community.

(Please note: we haven’t yet officially announced Poland as having crossed the 50% mark, as Gemius’ market share data shows Firefox at about 45%.)