SUMO Blog

For a few days now, we’ve been noting that the Firefox 3.6 release went smoother than 3.5. Now we can quantify it. By looking at the amount of traffic to SUMO, we expect a spike every time there’s a release — especially if there are issues that affect a large number of users.

The following chart shows number of daily unique visitors for release day and 3 days after each release relative to the exact same figure for a week prior. The blue band represents the mean of the data for non-release days ±1 SD.

As you can see, we got a large increase in traffic from the 2.0>3.0.1 major update and the 3.5 release. (Since 3.0 was the first Firefox version to link to SUMO for help, there was not much SUMO traffic prior to 3.0 and the spike around the 3.0 release was over 500%). However, the recent 3.6 release resulted in a significantly smaller traffic jump. This suggests that there were fewer major issues around the 3.6 release — Firefox 3.6 is definitely the best Firefox yet.

Of course, the baseline daily unique visitor count has increased from 180,000 after the 3.0 release to around 400,000 before 3.5 to over 750,000 before the 3.6 release. So while the Firefox developer, QA, release engineering and support teams have been doing a great job making sure these releases are smoother and smoother, we are still getting a lot of traffic and we can still use your help! Learn how here.

The SUMO development team meeting (also known as the SUMOdev meeting) has been moved from Tuesdays at 9 am Pacific to Mondays at the same time. This is because one of our developers, paulc, is taking a course this quarter that conflicts with the regular meeting time. Since we’re a small team, we can’t just go on with one third of the team missing from these meetings, so we decided to move it. At the end of this quarter, we will move it back to Tuesdays again.

The new time is Mondays 9 am Pacific.

For those who aren’t familiar with these meetings, the SUMOdev meeting is an opportunity to get a glimpse of the hard work we do “behind the scene” with SUMO. Most of the time, the meetings are about prioritizing and assigning tasks (think “bugs”) to developers, but occasionally we discuss more high-level things like setting goals, defining roadmaps, and brainstorming new features. Even if you’re not a developer, you’re more than welcome to listen in.

Sumo

• Weekly metrics
  • Ability to see ratio of people coming to support vs the ADUs?
    • Better question: How good was one release compared to another in terms of added support requests vs ADUs? Would be powerful metric to show to developers, to compare the relative traffic increase. Cww to investigate.
• Last week’s weekly support issues
  • Lot of focus on 3.6. Assumed problems with Personas, didn’t happen. First day we figured out that the reason why people couldn’t see their bookmarks was the Torbutton extension.
• EU Browser Ballot start page
  • cilias to create wiki page or contributor forum discussion where we settle on the content of the page so localizers can then start the effort of translating it.

Knowledge Base

• New articles:
  • How to synchronize your bookmarks and settings between computers
  • Many windows open after downloading
  • Some plugins used by this page are out of date
  • New tabs do not appear to the right of the last tab
  • Upgrading to Firefox 3.6
• Notable edits:
  • Added Torbutton issue to Lost Bookmarks
  • Facebook chat issue added to Problems using Facebook in Firefox
• KB Objectives
  • How can be better define each item in the list?
  • Are there any items that don’t belong (duplicates)?
  • Any items missing, that you feel should be in the list?

Forum

• People didn’t use the Troubleshooting Information as much as we were expecting. bug 541219
• We should really thank Jesse’s brother who answered 120 questions!
  • On behalf of the SUMO community: Thank you!
• Hosted design lunch on new forum design.

Live Chat

• We did extended live chat hours last week for Thursday and Friday – 25 contributors!
• Only about 30% of the users in Live Chat using 3.6, remaining using 3.5 (few on 3.0).
• Java issues were more frequent than normal
  • General discussion about sharing insights about common issues between forum and Live Chat, since they’re sometimes not revealing the same trends. cww and zzxc to make sure they’re aligned and have shared data before putting Weekly Common Issues together and communicate to the rest of the Mozilla community.
• We’re doing more extended hours this week (one extra hour on Tuesday and Thursday)
• Tag data from the release

Firefox 3.6 is coming out tomorrow, which means it is going to be a very busy time for support. As with every major launch, we see a spike in support requests as users get used to features and discover the changes that were made. We would like to get your help giving users of 3.6 the best possible support experience.

You can help in a few different ways.

1) Help users real time over live chat. Live Chat hours will be extended to 6 hours a day. On Thursday the hours will be: 9-11am, 12-2pm, 3-5pm and 8-9pm PST We’ll have lots of support requests and users questions especially during these times.

2) Help users on our support forums. The forums are always open. To find recently asked forum questions that need your help, use our new search engine. Select the Forum tab, change the status to Needs help or Has no replies and select the Firefox forum. For example this search gives recent questions that mention 3.6.

3) Report any popular issues. We will be meeting with the Firefox team everyday to report and discuss any common issues users are having with 3.6. You can report issues as well as stay informed about recent issues in the Contributors forum.

If you have any questions, just ask in the Contributors forum or in the #sumo IRC channel. Thanks in advance for helping out, Firefox 3.6 is going to be a great release!

PS: If you’re helping out, don’t forget to use the BRAND NEW Help > Troubleshooting Information menu item to get info about extensions and stuff from users. This should really make doing support a whole lot easier.

Sumo

• Weekly metrics
• Last week’s weekly support issues
  • Forum and live chat issues differ. On forum, most people are have problems with Facebook and other websites not working, rather than crashes. In live chat, there are more crashes reported than websites not working. Most issues need more investigation.

Knowledge Base

• 3.6 release update
  • Updates for articles on installing Firefox are being reviewed. Should be done by the end of today.
  • We should blog about support plans for release week some time this week.
• EU browser ballot status
  • Flash article is now ready for review.
• ‘Smart Location Bar’ article being renamed to ‘Location bar autocomplete’. References to the feature will renamed to ‘Awesome Bar’ (Discussion )
• Listing key objectives of the KB
  • The bullets there right now are proposed by community members. They are not final.
  • We should reword them to be more concrete.
  • These should be measurable.
  • The intent is to make sure that the changes we focus on have the greatest affect on the performance and quality of the KB.
  • Does this affect/change SUMO scope?
  • This would be good discussion for a community meeting.
• Should we point the Weave help-topic link to the syncing bookmarks article? bug 530267
  • Yes. We can easily change it, if we decide to have two separate article.

Forum

• no update

Live Chat

• Live Chat tag trends
  • No issues up significantly
  • Flash remains the most common reason for crashes

Roundtable

• Presenting at Mozilla-wide weekly update meeting

Sumo

• Welcome back!
• Weekly metrics
  • cilias to include data for trended search terms
  • “url is not valid” is top trended search term. Not addressed in KB. forum thread indicates that it could be a conflict between the Google and Norton Toolbar.
• Last week’s weekly support issues

Knowledge Base

• 3.6 release week plan
  • 3 articles to update during release week (Installing Firefox on Windows, Installing Firefox on Mac, and Updating Firefox), and maybe an “updating to 3.6″ article. cilias will lead that.
  • We will have daily meetings with developers to communicate any issues users are having. Cww will arrange that, when release date is set.
  • Live chat hours will be extended to 6 hours per day.
  • We should blog before 3.6 is released, to get people involved in the forum, and let them know we will be communicating any issues with the dev team, so contributors can pass on what they are finding as well and stay informed of the status on any issues.
• EU browser ballot status
  • zzxc to finish up For IE users article today.
• Awesome Bar vs. Smart Location Bar
  • Marketing team has been using the term “Awesome Bar”, rather than “Smart Location Bar”. We think it is best practice to follow the lead of marketing when it comes to these issues.
  • For article names, it would be best to use terminology that users understand (and use), so we are not obligated to rename the Smart Location Bar article to ‘Awesome Bar’, especially for troubleshooting articles. cilias to start thread in Contributors forum.

Forum

• Traffic was up last week. Most likely because of holidays.
• Don’t know how new forum status’ “me too” and “reply from OP” should be incorporated into metrics.
  • A “me too” post should not be included in answer rate, because those are mostly not attempts to help the original poster.

Live Chat

• Lots of participation over the holidays
• No new common issues, more “how to” questions over the holidays.
• Openfire->Tikiwiki account integration on track
  • We will be trying a demo account migration this week for testing
    • No date for that push yet. Will bring it up in tomorrow’s sumodev meeting.

Back in October, we started the effort to solicit feedback and ideas from various people, including of course our wonderful SUMO community. I wrote about the three primary objectives for the SUMO project as a whole:

1. To help people have a great Firefox (and by extension web) experience
2. To provide key user and product insights to the Mozilla community
3. To strengthen and grow Mozilla’s community

However, one thing that I didn’t mention specifically was our efforts in 2009 to make SUMO an open source support platform that can be used for other projects. A real example of that is the new Firefox Help for Mobile website, but other sites could follow in the future. Also related to this is our effort to improve the underlying SUMO platform to be easier to develop for, more performant, and more secure. These things all ultimately benefit our users and community and are important to focus our efforts on.

As a result, there are actually four primary focus areas for SUMO in 2010:

• Improve the user experience
• Get better insights about our users
• Improve the contributor experience
• Make the platform awesome

Based around these focus areas, we have prioritized developed a shiny roadmap for SUMO in 2010. It is primarily available in a fairly uninspiring spreadsheet, but as an alternative, it is also available in a more fancy slideshow format:

Thanks to everyone who participated and helped shaping the future of SUMO. 2010 will be a fantastic year for Mozilla!

Live Chat allows Mozilla community members to connect in real-time to a Firefox user seeking help.  We currently set three to four hours per day, based on community input, during which both volunteers wanting to provide help and users with questions are encouraged to come online.  Around 20 people per week usually help out each week, during which between 500 and 800 users are able to chat.

The system of setting aside official hours works well, as we are able to make sure experienced helpers are available during those times in order to help newer contributors and assist with questions that we don’t have documented solutions for yet.  Many users and contributors want to chat outside these rigid hours, so we want to allow users to chat anytime an experienced helper wants to help.

By showing users the current status of the chat queue and how many helpers are available, we can make sure more users who need personal support can get it.  When the expected wait time is high, users who would rather receive a reply by e-mail will be encouraged to ask a question using the support forum.  Volunteers can limit the number of chats they accept, and the queue status will be updated once the question limit is reached.

We will still specify official hours for Live Chat, so that both users and new contributors can plan to come online when experienced helpers are usually going to be online.  The added flexibility will let questions be asked at other times, as long as enough contributors are online to help.

If you’re looking for a way to get involved with the SUMO project by helping Firefox users and other volunteers, we’d love to have you in the Live Chat community.  It only takes a few minutes to get started!

A month ago, we asked you to fill out a survey regarding the improvements to the SUMO forums that we made in the 1.4 – 1.4.2 releases. Overall, the features we pushed were very well received.

Among what people said were their favorite features: the new bar that allows you quickly filter the forum threads and the new detailed ask a question form.

We also got some great suggestions, including: “Bring back the forum’s version of the Top 10 list”, “Word filters” and letting anonymous posters mark threads as solved without having to go via email. We’ll be looking to make sure features like this are implemented as we consider a forum redesign in 2010.

We also asked you to rank some of the major new features on a 1-5 scale:
(Note that we only got 7 responses so these numbers aren’t that statistically useful but it’s good to know that what we do is well-liked.)

How have each of the changes below affected how you use the forums? (1 = a lot worse, 5 = a lot better).

Thanks a bunch for filling out the survey.

Sumo

• Weekly metrics
• Last week’s weekly support issues
  • Norton causes startup crashes. Cheng to follow up with Kev.
  • Facebook chat is “slow.” Could be an old version of Flash. cilias to find out in forum thread, and update Facebook article.

Knowledge Base

• Mobile weave article is up. cilias will work on desktop version this week.
  • Needs to be drafted early, or else no one will be around to review it.
• uk and cs are now updated for Firefox 3.6.
• Waiting on Cheng and Matthew for en-US browser ballot article edits.

Forum

• Double traffic last week. Could be because of 3.5.6 update.

Live Chat

• Also had a big rise in traffic last week.
• Integrated login is scheduled to be pushed the first week of January.

Roundtable

• zzxc and Cww have blog posts to publish this week. Aiming for Cww’s post today, and zzxc’s post tomorrow.
• Merry Christmas to everyone!