Firefox Support Blog

We are proud to present the winning screencast made by the one and only, Cameron Roy:

• Article: How to customize the toolbar
• Screencast: Click to view

His video won because it best satisfied the four judging criteria.  For one, Cameron showed how to customize the toolbar, which is not the easiest concept to communicate or digest.  For many users, it’s a new concept to change around the position of the buttons that sit in the browser.  With his great video, Cameron really demystified how challenging this could have been for an end user.  The production quality met our standards with great timing and flow (not too fast, not too slow) and everything fitting well in the screencast.  Of course, we would not have chosen him if his video had not covered the concepts completely.  Finally, his screencast really matched the information in the article.  Users who read this article and view his screencast will have a very detailed explanation with an illustration of just how to rearrange the buttons on the toolbar.

This is exactly the type of screencast we were looking for - a visual medium to help translate and communicate technical concepts to a wider audience. Overall, a terrific effort by Cameron.  Nice work!!

The other winning screencasts will be announced soon…

Attendees: djst, Cww, cilias, np

Sumo

• Cww is in MV this week! Sitting in the conf room with djst.
• Proposed goals for Q3:
  • Establish formal feedback loop to QA/dev about user’s most common Firefox problems
  • Develop performance & customer satisfaction metrics to determine our quality of support
  • Get better understanding of how people are using SUMO to further improve the site — are people searching? what do they search for? what’s the usage ratio of the KB vs user-to-user support offerings?
  • Make the support forum helpful and easy to use for both contributors and users (SUMO 0.7 milestone)
  • Plan, design, and develop improved search engine to replace the one currently used in SUMO
• New milestone scheme — instead of major 0.x milestones and ad hoc production server pushes, we’re switching to minor 0.0.x milestones on a bi-weekly basis
  • This gives us and IT better control, and allows for more structured scheduling
  • The overall 0.x milestones will still be kept, but they will be fixed incrementally. E.g. 0.7 will be preceded by 0.6.1, 0.6.2, etc.

Knowledge Base

• Survey results and analysis are posted in mozilla.support.planning [1]. Lots of good feedback that we should digest, e.g.:
  • UI of article editor confusing — djst has been in contact with Alain Désilets of TikiWiki about what things need improvement in terms of usability. Should definitely share this feedback with Alain.
  • cilias to provide a condensed list of UI/l10n specific feedback and report to djst
• Bugzilla: 4 new article requests [2], 1 article bug fixed [3].

Forums

• Similar traffic as last week. No stats this week.
• np still has some access problems in getting to use the db dumbs for stats analysis. Will comment in bug report about it.
• One of our biggest problems today is that most users post anonymously, and we have little knowledge of how many of those users actually find their way back to the thread they posted when someone responds to it. This is something we will fix with the 0.7 milestone by sending out an e-mail notification to the original poster whenever someone responds to a thread. The OP should then be able to either:
  • Select “Yes, this response solved my problem,” which would mark the thread as solved, or
  • Select “No, this response did not solve my problem,” which would take the user back to the thread so he/she can provide more info
• This will likely dramatically increase the number of users getting their problems solved, and it will also allow us to confirm that we’re doing a good job (customer satisfaction metrics).

Live Chat

• Cww, zzxc, and cilias can all help with covering the shifts for this week. np can’t really help out because of his full-time job that conflicts with the hours of operation.
• cilias has some good feedback about the Live Chat process since he views it from a different perspective than the people who have already used it. Will provide feedback and share with team.
• More generally, getting feedback from new contributors is something we should focus more on. Actively ask contributors if there are things they find confusing, and pay attention to what questions we receive from contributors/localizers.

The SUMO Screencast Contest is over and we now have 50 new videos to accompany the articles in the SUMO Knowledge Base.  Thank you for participating!!

We are thrilled to post them so our end users can begin to use this new content. And, we are excited to announce our winners!

For his work with How to customize the toolbar (note: that’s the Knowledge Base article; we’re still working on making the resulting screencast public!), the judges chose Cameron Roy.  Cameron submitted several stellar videos, many of which will be featured in the KB.  This video was high quality and complete — Cameron took a tricky topic, thought of a creative example to illustrate it, and did a great job filming the video!

If you submitted a video that was ranked best among the submissions for a particular article, you will be contacted shortly about your prize: a SUMO screencast t-shirt!

Thanks again, everyone.  Your work will have a lasting impact on Firefox’s 180+ million users who might need a little extra support.  Congrats!