October, 2009

plans / results — 1 Comment
23
Oct 09

200,000 Firefox Users Update Their Plugins

Mozilla recently announced the launch of a “plugin check” page (pictured below), allowing users to see a list of their installed plugins and whether or not any updates are needed.  This comes on the heels of a program where we successfully helped more than 10,000,000 Firefox users with a non-current version of Flash get to Adobe’s download/update page.

plugin_check_page2

Now that this new program has been live for about a week, we thought we’d check the numbers (cumulative since last week):

plugin_check_numbers

Considering that this page hasn’t been directly pushed to users, these numbers are significant.  There are a couple spots within mozilla.com where users can click to find this page, but otherwise, our web analytics reporting tells us that about 90% of the traffic has been coming from news and technology related web sites.

Next, you may be wondering where people ventured upon clicking to “Update” or “Research”.  Here’s a breakdown:

plugin_check_click_breakdown2

We’ll continue to keep an eye on these numbers, and perhaps more excitedly, there are plans to soon integrate this feature into the browser itself.

Uncategorized — 5 Comments
12
Oct 09

Predicting Firefox Growth

Our Metrics intern, Eric Hergenrader, did some terrific work analyzing fluctuations in Firefox usage.  Using a linear regression, he found that this summer’s decline in Firefox use was largely in line with expectations; a 2-3% decline in July and August is typical.  In addition to seasonality, Eric found that three factors driving usage drops are weekends (-18%), holidays (-30%), and Firefox releases (-13.5%).

Two months later, Eric’s model does a remarkable job predicting future usage.  Below, I have plotted actual against predicted usage.  The correlation between these two lines is remarkable.  Since September, the average prediction was off by just 1.63%!

Screen shot 2009-10-12 at 2.47.16 PM

To better understand daily growth variations, I created a heat map that visualizes month over month usage growth. Each cell contains one day’s growth rate over the same day of the week, 28 days earlier.

heatmapv2

Some highlights:

  • Strongest growth occurs during Spring and Fall
  • Periods of growth and decline are clustered
  • Growth is outperforming predictions by 2.58%

We must be careful not to overreach with our conclusions.  We are working with a limited range of data and have likely missed significant confounding variables.  That said–thanks to Eric’s work–we’re off to a great start.  Please leave your thoughts and any suggestions on how to improve our projections in the comments.

plans / process — 5 Comments
8
Oct 09

User Outreach Coming to mozilla.com

We’ve been spending some energy in recent months to better integrate user feedback into the Firefox user experience, including the installation experience and Firefox Support experience.  Given those insights and successes, we’re now planning to integrate user feedback into mozilla.com.

Why is this important?

  • It provides users with an opportunity to share their praise/criticism or any other thoughts
  • It strongly complements our web analytics efforts (i.e., we’re able to answer the “why” questions in terms of user experiences)
  • It ultimately allows the Fx team, marketing team, and many other groups across Mozilla to gain valuable insights and improve the Fx user experience

To accomplish this, we’ve implemented a feedback button/form on three critical touch points at mozilla.com:

Getting Started page

getting_started_page

First Run page

firstrun_page

Whatsnew page

whats_new_page

The feedback form on each page is slightly different (looking at the “categories” and “sub-categories”), depending on a user’s expectation of that page and the typical point in a user’s experience when he/she hits that page.  As an example, below is the form you will see upon hitting the feedback button on the whatsnew/update page.  And like our previous implementations, we’re not 100% sure what feedback to expect, so we’re going to closely monitor user comments and tweak the feedback forms accordingly.

Stay tuned!

feedback_form

results / Uncategorized — 4 Comments
5
Oct 09

Firefox Market Share – Sept 2009

September’s market share numbers are out and Firefox enjoyed a positive month.  While we’re still collecting numbers from a couple valuable sources (Gemius, Wikipedia), reports are readily available from both StatCounter and Net Applications (for a primer on the different sources, please read this previous post).

Emerging from the summer months, both reports show Firefox gaining about 1% (over the past couple months).  And looking at September specifically, Net Applications shows Firefox gaining more than 0.75%.

Net Applications:

netapp_sept09

StatCounter:

statcounter_sept09

Beyond just the past couple months, you’ll notice that overall trending also looks quite good.  Over the past year, Net Applications shows Firefox picking up more than 4 percentage points, and StatCounter shows more than 6 percentage points.