Firefox Support Blog

Attendees: djst, cilias, zzxc, cww, nkoth

Sumo

• Weekly metrics
• Last week’s weekly support issues
  • Corrupt places.sqlite issue - cww to file bug and write KB article on how to replace the file
  • zzxc says some people experience the prefs not saving issue with Norton 360. Disabling 360 solves the problem. Need to talk to Norton about that.
• Top understandable articles generally have only “Yes” votes on the other question “Did this article solve a problem you had with Firefox?”
• CSAT data for KB — cww will look into it this week to give us an average

Knowledge Base

• KB metrics (Cww)
• Bugzilla: no activity
• 270+ articles with no language set [1]: If you can help assign languages, that would be appreciated.
  • nkoth to look into it this week. djst to to test with non-admin acount
• We’re going to use SHOWFOR for Firefox 3.1 content. [2]
• Looking for ways to determine who to promote to reviewer (if other people are reviewing edits, how do we become aware of who should be promoted?)
  • It feels like a potential reviewer should want to become one — that should be the first step (request to become one), at which point we could review that person’s past edits (djst)
  • Have other reviewers nominate good article editors (cww)
  • Generally, we should promote the idea of having people reviewing other people’s edits. It should be the norm for new articles or significant edits.

Support Forum’

• Traffic down. Related to forum being slow and inaccessible.
• New off topic forum — yay!
• Contributor forum is now open to the public. Anonymous people can respond to existing threads, but not create new threads.
• Getting individual feedback from forum contributors about their experiences.

Live Chat

• 7 new accounts, 0 approvals
• Traffic about the same, up to 75% of questions answered
• Top issues
  • Bookmarks not saved (4 cases)
  • Preferences not saved (3 cases)
  • Crashes (18 total)
  • Confusion with “Warn me when closing multiple tabs” options (3 cases)
  • Turner Media Plugin videos not playing properly (3 cases)
• Other issues
  • Generic “0″ error when installing Firefox on Windows (2 cases). Error in NSIS or in our NSIS installer script?
  • Two people confirmed that they were unable to connect to any sites after installing Symantec Antivirus, uninstalling Norton 360, and upgrading Firefox.
• Improving Live Chat documentation to help users troubleshoot common issues. In staging area right now.

SFD

• Main topic of SFD: Localizing SUMO
• Secondary topic: Mozilla 2010 Goals

We’re planning to have a 3-hour event in 3 different timeslots: one for Asia, one for Europe and one for the Americas.

• Friday Nov 21st, 5 AM GMT (2 PM Tokyo time, 6 AM Central European time, Thursday 9 PM PST)
• Friday Nov 21st, Noon GMT (9 PM Tokyo time, 1 PM Central European time, Friday 4 AM PST)
• Friday Nov 21st, 7 PM GMT (Saturday 4 AM Tokyo time, 8 PM Central European time, 11 AM PST)

Each session will hopefully have the following “events”:

• Presentations: These will be mostly short and pre-recorded with someone present to do followup and answer questions and perhaps do live demos as they see fit. The reason we need prerecorded is because of the three separate timeslots.
  • Localizing SUMO: Getting started and translating your first article. (Cww)
  • Keeping your translations and locale up to date: finding out when things change and working with your locale to complete translation. E-mail notifications, SHOWFOR. (cilias)
• Longer term goals for 2010. djst (+Mitchell Baker?) leading into… a roundtable/open discussion on 2010 goals for Mozilla. (More details will be ironed out this week)
• An open meet-and-greet. This will give everyone a chance to find other people interested in Firefox Support in their language and coordinate efforts.
• Cww to coordinate and make sure all presenters are informed about technical details and have properly setup environments (mic, screen sharing software, etc)

On October 1st, I announced the top 15 Knowledge Base articles for localizers to translate. One week later, all 15 articles were translated into Japanese! Big thanks to Masahiko Imanaka for looking after those article translations. We really appreciate the hard work.

Over the next few days, I’ll be sending out invitations to Firefox Support knowledge base localizers to take a survey. If you receive an invite, do not mistake it for spam. There are multiple goals in the survey, which should help us find out what barriers are preventing people from translating articles, and find out how to eliminate those barriers.

If you’re a translator on support.mozilla.com but not a support.mozilla.com locale leader, contact us by sending an email to djst at mozilla dot com, providing your username so we can send you the survey. Thanks for helping us make the knowledge base better!

Over the past month and a half, we’ve started an effort to gather data from users who come to support or provide input to other places in the Mozilla community to identify issues with Firefox that are new or frequently mentioned by our everyday users. This information is conceivably useful to a number of people from support contributors to QA team members to developers and marketing. This post will discuss the progress we’ve made so far and what people across the Mozilla community can do to help out and get involved.

Each week, we are going through a sizable sampling of forum posts, Live Chat conversations and posts to Hendrix to figure out the common issues. The focus here is on specific issues. Rather than noting that dozens of people have crashes, we’re flagging an issue if dozens of people have crashes when downloading specific files or visiting a specific site.

The central page for all this information is the Weekly Common Issues page. That page has a table of the issues we’re currently tracking. Each issue gets its own thread where more details will be provided as well as links to the source reports. Importantly, each thread will also list the information that we’re seeking from users who are experiencing a given issue to give support volunteers some questions to ask of users. The threads are open so that users can also post any answers they have directly in the thread or attach relevant files without registering.

This is where the community comes in (that means you!). Members of the community can volunteer to lead the followup for each issue. Followup can be very simple (write the relevant KB article if the cause is known) or be more involved (working closely with users and QA to identify the source of problem and coming up with an acceptable solution or workaround). Whether or not you choose to lead the investigation of issues, there is a lot you can do to help out. Since we can’t read everything that everyone writes about Firefox, we would appreciate if you see additional reports of a given issue to note it in the relevant thread. You can also help by testing or suggesting workarounds and suggesting questions that we should be asking to troubleshoot. A lot more information and a FAQ is in this discussion thread.

The other half of the metrics project which is also on the weekly issues page is measuring way users use our knowledge base. The current ranking is based off a score that incorporates the number of users that reach an article via search results, the number who reach via links on the front page and the number of votes that a page has (yes and no votes) in response to the question: “Did this article solve a problem you had with Firefox?” For a really long discussion of how we’re calculating this and some of the reasoning behind it, see this post.

Since these rankings are based on support articles that users find themselves, it can be hard to tell which single issue users may be experiencing in each case. However, a few generalized conculsions can be drawn. For example: Four of the top five articles this week are related to clearing the location bar, search bar (which is likely users confusing search bar with location bar) or clearing private data in general. This suggests that having “private” results show up when using the new Awesomebar is still one of our users’ top concerns. Essentially, these rankings are a good indication of what kind of help users are looking for when they come to support.mozilla.com. As we refine the articles, split up overarching articles and provide more specific titles, we hope that these metrics will get better and better at pinpointing exactly what concerns and issues our users are facing most often.

By tracking users’ specific issues in threads and collecting generalized metrics through the knowledge base, we can better address the concerns quicker and improve our support process. Most importantly, however, this is an effort that we would really like your help with and input on. Whether you’re just linking to reports of the tracked issues, helping test or leading the followup, it’ll all help make our user experience that much better.

A few weeks ago, creative extraordinaire Tara and I took on the fun task to create a logo to visually represent the SUMO community support project. In order to get a logo that truly captures the core values of SUMO, Tara initiated the process of collecting feedback from the community, asking for inspirational words, ideas, and even design concepts that could be incorporated into the final logo. I did the same in the mozilla.support.planning newsgroup and in the contributor forum, and together we collected a massive amount of thoughts and ideas that really helped us write the creative brief that will be used by the design firm responsible for creating our logo (the same awesome people that created the logo for QMO).

Some examples of words that describe SUMO: community, global, teamwork, problem-solving, communication, open, information exchange, open-source, collaboration, help, personal, quality, support.

To those who provided feedback and thoughts about SUMO and the words that describe the community project: thank you! Stay tuned for some design concepts for the logo soon…

Attendees: djst, zzxc, Cww, nkoth, myles7897

Sumo

• Weekly metrics
  • djst has created a dashboard in Omniture so everyone in the team can look at the same data
  • Next step is to make sure that data is published automatically
• Last week’s weekly support issues
  • Format has completely changed, new status fields.
  • Now focuses on getting info from Forums mainly rather than Hendrix.
  • How to get people to sign up?
    • Blog about it, and make sure the info on the page is as straightforward as possible — suggest creating a separate FAQ for the descriptions and explanations
  • How do we keep track of Policy on threads asking for more information
    • We could use one contributor forum thread per weekly common issue, to keep track of information gathering etc.
    • Alternatively, we could create a separate forum if these threads are taking over the contributor forum

Knowledge Base

• KB metrics (Cww)
  • This is how we calculate the top KB articles. Just looking at the vote polls is not enough, as some articles are much more trafficked than others, skewing the data.
  • Have to look at what people search for, and normalize the score with the page hits.
• Bugzilla: 1 new article request [1], 0 article bugs verified fixed
• Going to send out survey to localizers this week
• All top 15 articles in the Knowledge Base are translated into Japanese! SUMO is proud. :)

Support Forum

• Some recent db issues recently bug

Live Chat

• Top issues - full report coming soon
  • Many users can’t figure out how to sort bookmark folders due to bug 400447
  • More info needed on Flash sound issue, bug 436686
  • Yahoo logins not working for some people, seems to be related to Yahoo Toolbar
  • Preferences not saved, same as last week
  • Logins not remembered after restarting Firefox, same as last week
  • Strange Mac issues (fonts look wrong, gfx issues, window positioning wrong) fixed by clearing Mac caches.
• 6 accounts created, 0 accounts approved
• Traffic down last week, percentage of chats answered up to 70%
• New blog post about scheduling live chat hours, anyone who can help should add themselves
• Live Chat CSAT: idea page updated, bug 458713

SFD

• No more feedback. We should just pick a date and hope that we have the response that we need.
  • The focus is on localization, so we need to split up the day in separate shifts for the different regions (Asia, Europe, America)
  • Friday, November 21!
  • This means late Thursday PDT for the early Asian shift.
• Who is best for making presentations? Current topics:
  • How to localize articles - cww?
  • Tips and tricks for keeping up to date on translations — cilias?
  • Localizing for Firefox 3.1

Approximately a month ago, I posted about a discussion I started in the Contributors forum, to gather ideas criteria for an improved Knowledge Base article editor. There is still time to post your thoughts and feedback about what problems you have with the current editor and ideas on how to solve those problems.

For instance, the problems gathered so far are:

• While tikiwiki markup is simple and relatively easy to learn, you still have to learn it. When a new contributor wants to edit an article and opens the editor, he/she is often confronted with a lot of markup code, which can deter him/her from attempting to edit the article.
• In order to remove a tag from an article, you need to open the editor and make an edit to the article.
• There are a lot of small variations of tag names (e.g. bookmark vs. bookmarks) meaning two or more articles that should have the same tag, end up not having the same tag. This is mostly because people don’t know which tags already exist, when adding a tag to an article.
• The additional categories sometimes get misused, or not used at all.
• Use of the dynamic content feature or the fantastic ShowFor plugin that we use to show/hide content depending on the Firefox version and OS requires manually typing the markup, which is not only laborious but increases the chance of markup errors.
• Not many people are citing references when adding content to articles, or even explaining their changes.
• The images for quickly applying markup are not very intuitive.
• Uploading of screenshots is separated from the article content, and hard to find.
• Whenever the ShowFor plugin is used, we have to add {SHOWFOR(spans=on)/} to the top of the article.
• When using the ShowFor plugin, you have to save an edit to see if it works; previewing it isn’t possible.
• The size of the content area is not wide enough or tall enough, causing a lot of content lines to be wrapped, and a lot of scrolling to reference content elsewhere in the article.
• The category selector to choose where the article will exist can easily be misused. In fact, if you’re editing an article that is already in the Knowledge Base, all edits have to be made to the staging copy first, which should only exist in the staging area category.
• The “Alert translators” checkbox is often misused, causing translations to be marked as out of date.

Some of the proposed ideas for solving these issues are:

• The editor should be “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG). This way, contributors do not have to know the markup in order to improve content.
• Adding and removing tags should be separate from the article editor; and in the separate UI, contributors should be able to find out which tags have already been created, either through auto complete or using checkboxes to add tags.
• The additional categories checkboxes should only be visible when creating a new article, and only made available afterwards for admins/locale leaders.
• Dynamic content blocks should be part of the editor toolbar as a quickpaste function.
• We should have buttons on the editor toolbar for applying ShowFor.
• {SHOWFOR(spans=on)/} should be automatically applied to every article that uses the feature.
• Create or find icons for the editor toolbar that are easily interpretable.
• The image upload feature should be part of the editor toolbar, just like in Wordpress.
• The width of the content area should be 100% of available space; and default height should fill up a large portion of the average screen space, only leaving room for the toolbar.
• Get rid of the category selector on staging copies.
• Relabel the “Alert translators” checkbox to more accurately communicate the affects, and add a warning to it.
• We could either add a ‘Reference’ field for contributors to cite references, or add something to the “Edit Summary” label about citing a reference.

There’s still time to add more ideas and feedback, and we want to make sure everyone has a chance to contribute to the discussion. If you would like to add anything, please post in the discussion thread. Thanks!

The Mozilla Support (SUMO) project is unique in the way it involves the broader Mozilla community to improve the user experience. The Live Chat component of SUMO, which I started leading last month, is no exception. As a compliment to the Support Forum, Live Chat is best able to investigate new issues that arise and serve users who need help following the written documentation. Live Chat helpers can investigate issues interactively with affected users, obtaining useful data for the rest of the community. Not all helpers actively answer questions - we also need people who can advise other helpers and ensure quality service. People who have helped in Live Chat range from new Firefox users to seasoned support volunteers to Firefox developers.

One great thing about support as a community is that the line between user and helper is blurred. Many of the current support volunteers got started by asking a question themselves, staying around to help other people using information learned solving their own problems. While most users don’t have time to commit regularly, many users have spent extra time to troubleshoot an issue, to let us know what finally fixed a problem, or to post advice about solved issues in the forum. Likewise, many people in the Mozilla community without a lot of time to commit have helped by assisting newer helpers when a new issue arises. The support community allows new helpers to learn about Mozilla and support in general, while actively helping users solve problems.

While SUMO doesn’t define rigid roles for contributors, we need people helping users and those assisting helpers to be available at once for quality help in Live Chat. To regularly achieve this, we are starting a new scheduling system where community members can sign up to fill a ‘role’ in a given time slot.

• Advisor: Senior helpers and other community members who can assist other helpers, but not accept user questions directly.
• Helper: The majority of volunteers sign up as helpers, answering questions from users and participating in discussions in #sumo.
• Anchor: These users commit to an entire block of time, ensuring that users aren’t left without a helper.
• Room monitor: Experienced helpers who watch chats in progress and document new findings to ensure quality service. They should ensure that correct advice is given and that helpers are discussing issues in #sumo.

A senior helper, for example, might want to anchor two hours and advise five hours in a given week. If you know specific times that you can help, please sign up so that other helpers know when to come.

If you think Live Chat might be right for you, read our documentation on getting started. To start accepting Live Chat questions, you will need to get the open source Spark client. However, you can get started assisting other helpers on irc, joining chat sessions using any XMPP (Jabber) client. If you think another area of SUMO would suit you best, check out our other ways to contribute. Alternatively, simply join #sumo on irc.mozilla.org (or via mibbit) to ask us directly!

Attendes: djst, cilias, zzxc, cww, nkoth, lucy

Sumo

• Weekly metrics
  • Bug 455190 made the poll stats unreliable; should be fixed starting from last week’s push. cilias to verify and report to nkoth if there are still problems.
• Last week’s weekly support issues
  • People stuck on looping update messages. Probably a prefs.js locked problem. lucy to look up more info.
• Logo feedback gathered in newsgroup thread. If you haven’t provided feedback yourself, please do it asap!
• “Are the links on the front page detracting people from using search?” discussion on mozilla.support.planning [1]
• Search box in the top nav performs a mozilla.com site specific search, not a SUMO search [2]. djst to look up how many people search there on SUMO, if possible. If not, we’ll probably just remove the search box.

Knowledge Base

• Bugzilla: 2 new article bugs [3][4], 1 bug verified fixed [5]
• Firefox 3.1 changes [6]

Live Chat

• Top live chat issues, several need investigation or more information
• 4 new chat accounts, 1 account approval: auswddn
• We are now following up chats in the forum after the user understands what to do. That way we can reduce the average chat session length, become more effective, while still providing high class support for our users. All chat helpers should search the forum for their name after helping, to catch followups.

SFD

• E-mail sent to localizers, early feedback
  • Fix bugs that prevent widespread adoption of SUMO first before asking localizers to help en masse.
  • Goal should be to get more people (isn’t it always?) and increase communication between locales/en-US
  • Would like info on how to get started translating and keeping translations up to date
• Decide a day for the event next week

Before Firefox 3 was released, we gave localizers a list of Support articles that needed to be translated because they were linked to from within Firefox. But what about after that? If someone wants to get started translating other articles in the Knowledge Base, what are the top articles not linked from within Firefox?

After looking at support.mozilla.com traffic data (since the release of Firefox 3 and all-time), and weighting articles that we feature on the front page, I’ve compiled this list of top 15 articles that should be translated:

1. Installing Firefox
2. Installing Firefox on Windows
3. Installing Firefox on Linux
4. Installing Firefox on Mac
5. Customizing Firefox with add-ons
6. Profiles
7. Hiding bookmarks in the Smart Location Bar
8. Backing up your information
9. Firefox is already running but is not responding
10. Clearing Location bar history
11. Firefox will not start
12. Bookmarks and toolbar buttons not working after upgrading
13. ActiveX
14. Search suggestions
15. How to set the home page

Some localizations of the start page get as much a 50,000 views a month; and localization of the Knowledge Base can be scattered. Those are the most wanted articles for localization, and translating them will have the greatest impact on users finding content in their own language. For instructions on how to translate articles, read our tutorial on translating articles.

If you have any questions, comment here or in the Contributors forum.