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The SUMO Screencast Contest: Sharing Knowledge Through Video
Recently, I’ve been helping David Tenser with the SUMO Screencast Contest, which will launch this Monday, May 19. You’ve likely read about it in the about:mozilla newsletter and on the SUMO blog. Please consider participating! Although the microsite for the contest is not live, we are launching the contest through Spread Firefox. Therefore, we’ll send the link around next week so you can learn how to enter the contest and submit your screencast.
Before I go further though, here’s a bit of why I got involved. This quarter, I decided to work more closely with David and the support team to help build the SUMO community. Three weeks ago, I blogged about my experience with Mozilla Live Chat! and why I thought it was an important experience for me to have tried as a Mozilla contributor. Live support is such a great way to help end-users, and highly educational, but it is likely that it will have some challenges of scale. Nevertheless, that was one effort by me to become more involved and I’ll keep participating when I can.
Another project I’ve committed to working on is the contest. David and I came up with the idea to host a contest where anyone could create a screencast that visually demonstrates the instructions that are spelled out in any one of the top 100 support articles in the SUMO knowledge base. Our thinking was that if we could get people excited to help produce cool, short screencasts that illustrated various support topics, not only would it lead to some great content for the SUMO site, but also to ongoing contributions from interested volunteers. We’ll see if we are proven right or wrong, but David and I have high hopes.
One reason I find this one so important is that a good screencast can serve as the unique user experience that bridges a well written how-to article together with live support. With a set of great screencasts, a user not only will read the accompanying article that might solve the issue they are having, but also he or she will see exactly how to perform the fix to the problem. Without being able to provide live support to every single end-user (we have north of 150 million of users these days!), screencasts are a leveraged solution that come pretty close to live support. I know I have benefited from live help with other technologies, but also have found that a great screencast can be even more helpful. I can go back and watch it again, pause the video, and share it with others.
So, if you have time and interest, please participate!! We have great prizes:
- a unique run of t-shirts for those people who submit the best screencast for each of the 100 articles (yes, that could be as many as 100 winners if we get enough screencasts submitted!)
- and, a grand prize for the best overall video…ok we’re still keeping it a secret, but you can use it to record stuff and then play that stuff back…
Looking forward to receiving your entry!
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Why you should give Mozilla Live Chat! a try
On Friday, I participated in our first Support Day at Mozilla. My last post talked about what I had hoped to accomplish during the day. I’m proud to say that I did nearly everything except upload a screen shot to an article. (I use a Mac and found that most of Mac-specific SUMO support articles also had great accompanying screen shots.) I thought I would use this post to relay some observations about Mozilla’s support day.
Most of my day was spent doing Mozilla Live Chat! support. After a few training sessions where I observed a member from our SUMO community doing live chat, I was cleared to take support requests from end-users. I was struck by the importance of this experience — interacting with our users, answering what might be considered simple questions from within the walls of Mozilla, and learning a lot about our product. My experience also begged the question, “Is the end-user part of the Mozilla Community?”. Some may claim that the question is not really something to debate. Of course, the end-user is part of the community, right? Or, is our community simply the world of volunteers who help make our product ready for end-user? You be the judge: I learned from them just as I learned from those who help localize our software or help others write extensions. And, I found myself asking, “How easy is our software to use and how well is our software designed for user interaction?”.
Here is an excerpt from a support session, in case you’d like to read about just how one went. I’ve changed the end-user identity and edited out some parts to keep it short:
Friday, April 11, 2008
(12:43 PM) sethb: hi end-user51
(12:43 PM) end-user51: Hi. Can you help?
(12:43 PM) sethb: so you cannot view your adobe documents with your browser?
(12:45 PM) end-user51: No. The message reads”Cannot use reader to view document in your browser. now closing.
(12:46 PM) sethb: let me do some research on your issue. i’ll be back in a second. ok?
(12:47 PM) end-user51: ok. Trying to get my proof of insurance so I can register my car.
(12:47 PM) sethb: ok…we’ll try to do this quickly.
(12:48 PM) end-user51: Thanks. Work graveyard at a casino. Had to stay up in order to do this.
(12:49 PM) sethb: ok. what version of Adobe Reader are you using?
(12:49 PM) sethb: can you find that?
(12:49 PM) end-user51: Will check
(12:49 PM) end-user51: 7.0
(12:50 PM) sethb: ok
(12:50 PM) sethb: can you do one thing for me? open a new tab in Firefox and paste (or type) about:plugins into the URL bar where you would type a webpage.
(12:50 PM) sethb: let me know when you’ve done that
(12:51 PM) end-user51: ok, got it
(12:51 PM) sethb: i am going to see if your Adboe Reader plugin is enabled.
(12:51 PM) end-user51: okI quickly found out from end-user51 that the plug-in was enabled.
(12:54 PM) sethb: is Adobe open?
(12:54 PM) sethb: try this:
(12:54 PM) sethb: 1. In Adobe Reader, choose “Edit -> Preferences -> Internet”.
2. Deselect “Display PDF In Browser” and then click OK.
3. Choose “Edit -> Preferences -> Internet”
4. Select “Display PDF In Browser” and then click OK.
(12:55 PM) end-user51: sorry. Got kicked off firefox. Had to restart session.
(12:56 PM) sethb: no problem.
(12:56 PM) end-user51: ok. give me a minute.
(12:58 PM) end-user51: will retry my proof
(12:58 PM) sethb: ok.The end-user followed this recommendation and responded:
(1:00 PM) end-user51: Yeah, it works!! Thanks so much!!!!!! Was stuck huh?
(1:00 PM) sethb: so now you can view your Adobe docs?
(1:00 PM) sethb: great.
(1:01 PM) sethb: if there’s nothing else, please go get some sleep and take care of me next time i visit the black jack tables.
(1:01 PM) end-user51: didn’t have to restart to get it to work. Thanks again. Good training excersize?
(1:01 PM) sethb: great exercise. thanks.A few remarks and observations about this conversation and my experience with Live Chat!:
- “end-user51″ has a life! Brilliant observation, I realize… But, after reading that this person had been working the graveyard shift and had stayed awake to figure out this problem, I was somehow even more motivated to solve this quickly. It took about 20 minutes for me to figure it out, but with more familiarity, I bet I could have answered this in under 10 minutes.
- Why wouldn’t this person deserve anything less than a consistent, polite, and helpful experience from Mozilla? That was my main objective. If this person is coming to us for live support, there is a good chance that they are on the verge of frustration or even anger. Maybe the person is even ready to ditch Mozilla for (gasp) “other browser”. What a great time to recapture a user’s loyalty, no?
- Is Live Chat! scalable? To provide quick and superb support to end-users, it seems like we will need to have a big, reliable, and well-trained Live Chat! community. Going forward, I will be dedicating a piece of my week to participate in Live Chat!, in hope to make it scalable. Please join me.
- Live Chat! is a great way to get your head out of the weeds and learn about how the product impacts the lives of end-users. My guess is even the most gifted developers would learn how to make Firefox better if they participated.
- Another shout-out to the community… The articles that have been written to help end-users solve issues and the active members of the community who were online behind the scenes to help me help end-user51 were critical to my success. Thanks to everyone!
I didn’t spend all day on Live Chat!. My day ended by scanning five articles in the SUMO knowledge base and providing minor edits when necessary. I competed the task, but again, I found that many articles were really well written and required only minor tweaks. This is not to say that SUMO is in perfect condition – a lot of content still needs to be created. But, what’s up is pretty darn good. David Tenser (our fearless and ebullient SUMO leader) and I want to continue to build the SUMO community this quarter. We’ll be trying creative ways to get more content on the site and to get more of you involved in the process. Interested? Then just ping me, please.
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My SUMO Challenge
The title sounds like a Japanese wrestling tournament. It’s not. I’m just getting geared up to participate in the first Mozilla “Support Day” this Friday, April 11. I thought I’d post what I intend to do and ask anyone reading this to join me by also participating in some way or another.
So, in case you missed it (from the SUMO day blog post):
“This is a great opportunity for you to get involved with Mozilla, regardless of your interests or expertise. We need people to write articles, create screenshots, correct spelling and grammar, answer people’s questions in the forum, or interact directly with Firefox users in live chat — just to name a few of the many ways you could help us out.”
You can learn more here at the SUMO Day webpage (already linked to above). I also found the contributor home page (passed to me by zzxc, thanks!) and this page created by SUMO community member, Bo Bayles, to be quite helpful as I prepare for the day.
It’s hard to gauge how much I can get done, but I thought I would try to do the following:
- Add screenshots to an article
- Participate in “Live Chat Support” (Learn more by following this link.)
- Review and edit 5 articles by improving wording and checking spelling and grammar
That should occupy a good part of my morning on Friday, then I have to get an MRI done on my ankle, so I’ll have to head out. I put my goals for SUMO day out there for everyone to read. If you’d like, feel free to post yours here…or post elsewhere and link to it in the comments.
community website
