SUMO Blog

A while back, the idea of creating an about:sumo newsletter was
proposed. Since then, we’ve been so busy with other parts of SUMO, that
we never got to follow through on that idea.

We haven’t forgotten! In the next three months, we’d like to test out
the idea, and see how it goes. The purpose of the newsletter would be to
provide a digest of news from the SUMO world for those who are not
actively involved, but still interested in knowing what we’re working on.

Over the next three months, we’ll publish a newsletter each month, and
depending on the feedback from the community, we’ll know whether or not
to make the newsletter a regular thing. Stay tuned for more information.

On the Firefox Support start pages[1][2], there are blocks of text on the sidebar labeled “Improve the Knowledge Base” and “Thunderbird”.

Those are referred to as “modules”, and until now those blocks have not been localizable. We are in the midst making the interface translator work on those modules. If you’d like to help test it, you can do so on the the staging server.

https://support-stage.mozilla.org/
username: support
password: stage

If you have any issues with it, comment on bug 444439 .

If you’re not familiar with the interface translator and have questions, just reply to this post.

Thanks!

[1]Website home page
[2]Product Help start page

Last month, website usability expert Neil Lee from the webdev team made a usability audit of the Firefox Support website. One observation he made was that some articles in our Knowledge Base are a bit verbose, making them harder than necessary to read. We’ve updated our Best Practices for Support Documents page, to include emphasis on writing concisely and reducing redundancy.

For example, our Pop-up Blocker article contains much more information than is needed. It tries to explain the difference between pop-ups and pop-unders, devotes an entire paragraph to telling you that Firefox has a pop-up blocker that is on by default, and includes notes about the pop-up blocker not being full-proof, even though there is a large section on pop-ups not being blocked at the bottom. As a result, the user can get lost in the details and miss the overall message.

Even short paragraphs and sections can be simplified. Here’s a recent example from an article about importing from Flock:

“It is possible to import settings and other user data (saved passwords, cookies, and history) from Flock into Firefox. This is an advanced operation, however, and it will replace Firefox’s data and settings with the settings from Flock. Only attempt the following instructions if you are comfortable with deleting your Firefox settings and data:”

• The user doesn’t need to be reminded that the instructions are for importing from Flock to Firefox — that’s what the article is about.
• The fact that it is Firefox data that is being replaced with Flock data is assumed.
• The last sentence is redundant with the previous statements.

That paragraph can be condensed to:

“To import settings and other user data (saved passwords, cookies, and history), this is an advanced operation and will replace existing Firefox data.”

It’s the same message, but clearer and more succinct.

We are continuously monitoring how well we are meeting our Firefox users’ expectations of their support experience. The Knowledge Base user satisfaction score is already pretty good at 87% — let’s see if we can push it above 90%!

Sumo

• Weekly metrics
  • Lots of edited articles. Cww to run query to figure out which locales are the most frequently edited.
• Last week’s weekly support issues
• Anything for Namoroka feedback? [1]
  • Our opportunity to share our insights of the most common support issues and dig deeper into what’s causing it and how it could be solved

Knowledge Base

• Meeting with Dutch localization team this week
• 5 of 21 parent options window articles purged
  • After all are done, next step is to remove Firefox 2 content. When should we remove “2.0″ from “Show customized content for”?
  • Let’s add a notification for Firefox 2 users that encourages people to upgrade. Once that’s up, we can remove the UI for choosing Firefox 2.
• 3.1 to 3.5 update tomorrow (SUMO 1.0.1)
  • We have test the query for gathering which articles will need updating, and will run that query tomorrow.
  • Category is renamed on staging
• New locales: Croatian (hr), Oriya (or), and Kazakh (kk)

Forum

• Traffic still up, 110+ locked dupes two weeks ago
• Lots of users still registering in the forum just to post a question
  • Need to make it more obvious that this is not necessary (and only slows the user down)
  • Cww to file bug to fix number of registrations

Live Chat

• Metrics update: 21 active helpers, 30,000 chat threshold reached, ~1100 chat sessions
• We are now linking users to How to Contribute on the chat feedback page
• Ricmacas and others have posted ideas about the Live Chat web client
  • zzxc to explain the individual UI components of the mockup(s)

Roundtable

• How to Contribute
  • cilias to change theme and test
• People getting spammed by e-mail notifications from stage
  • Laura’s been notified in the bug

One feature that support localizers have been wanting for a long time is email notification when an article edit is waiting for review. We now have it! Here’s how to set it up:

1. Log in to support.mozilla.com, and click on the “My Account” link in the site menu.
2. In the User Preferences page, click on the “MyWatches” icon.

   

3. At the bottom of the Watches page, there is a line that begins with “Watch wiki page changes in“. Set it to “Waiting for review” and the language you want to monitor.

   

4. Click on “Add watch“. The watch may not appear on the page at first, but if you click on “MyWatches” it will appear.

You can also watch how to set this up in this screencast.

One really neat thing about the way this is set up is that you can set up a watch for any other category, and any other language. For instance, if you want to watch for changes to English contributor documents, just set the category to “How to Contribute” and the language to “English“.

We hope that these language-specific category watches will make it much easier to keep up with the changes that affect a particular locale. If you’re localizing Firefox Support, please give it a try and share your experiences in the Contributors forum!