SUMO Blog

The support.mozilla.com community is really excited for the release of Firefox 3.5 tomorrow (Tuesday). The quality of support in the hours following a launch is important to ensure a great upgrading experience and a successful release overall, so we’re organizing an effort to answer as many user questions as possible on Launch Day, Tuesday, June 30th.

Most users on support.mozilla.com are able to get help via the knowledge base, but some people still need individual help. They may be reporting a new issue or may need help understanding or finding an article. We have two primary ways for these users to ask questions and have a community member (that’s you!) answer- the Forum and Live Chat.

To make this even easier and coordinate efforts, we are also maintaining a list of issues expected to be common in our Contributors Forum. This list contains links to knowledge base articles, bugs, possible solutions and other resources to help with Firefox 3.5 issues. We’ll make sure to update it often so keep that page open. If you are helping with Live Chat, we also have a post with tips for making Live Chat a success on release day.

To get started helping, join #sumo on irc.mozilla.org. We’ll have a number of people from the Mozilla Quality Assurance team helping to answer questions, along with Support Team members to answer any questions you have. Thanks to everyone who is able to help make Firefox 3.5 the best release yet!

Sumo

• Firefox 3.5 status
  • List of potential 3.5 issues is up in the Contributor forum
  • Potential addition: Error correction if people have changed folder names of top-level bookmark folders
  • List of add-ons not compatible with 3.5
    • Tab Mix Plus is definitely not compatible
    • TwitterFox?
    • Cww to ask Nick for a list and update the thread today
  • zzxc to post a Contributor forum post about specific Live Chat policies during the hectic launch — we need to be more efficient and less “chatty” to cope with the increased traffic
  • zzxc to blog about the above; cww to review
• SFD5 review
  • What went really well:
    • Demonstrating new technology. SUMO is a way to learn more about Firefox and be on
    • Getting people together
    • Putting faces on many of the regulars interacting with SUMO — Cww pointed camera to Marcia, reed, etc during the broadcast, which was a fun and engaging way to make the Mozilla people more familiar
    • Video broadcasting worked well
    • Time of day worked well for both Europe and Americas
    • Short and focused event
  • What didn’t work well:
    • Technical issues, like the IRC chat
    • Sometimes video sync problems
    • Video wasn’t really active, often just audio. For example, sometimes nothing changed in the video for minutes, while a discussion was taking place.
  • Ideas for the future:
    • Task-oriented events focusing on specific tasks that need to be completed, and less focus on engaging/fun activities
• Weekly metrics
  • Top trended search term is Firefox 3.5
  • Firefox Crashes article is not as understandable
• Last week’s weekly support issues
  • No specific new issues
  • 3.5 feedback is looking great — no major issues from SUMO users

Knowledge Base

• KB is ready to 3.5.
  • Screenshots are done for over 60% page hits.
  • Top 6 locales average at over 90% on l10n Dashboard.
  • Articles on Installing Firefox and Updating Firefox will be updated at the time of release.
    • cilias to update the staging copies of the articles and hit the publish button as soon as 3.5 ships
  • If a user notices something that should be updated in the KB, remember to encourage him/her to try editing the article.
• Any post-3.5 issues that need docs? Use Requesting an article.

Forum

• How many more people participated in the forum during SFD? How many sticked after SFD? Cww to follow up with metrics next week.
• 5 new contributors registered and posted in the forum last week

Live Chat

• Blog post tonight about participating during the 3.5 launch
• Schedule for tomorrow, everyone is invited to sign up to help.
• Firefox 3.5 tags from last week – user experience by far the top 3.5 issue.
  • zzxc to post detailed info about user experience problems related to 3.5 in Live Chat and ensure that the most important issues are covered in the previously mentioned list

Roundtable

• Let’s all embrace for impact — the 3.5 launch is going to be awesome/crazy!
• Great commitments from the QA and engineering teams to help out together with the SUMO community during the launch.

In the last 10 days, we’ve been running our second A/B test on SUMO to try a slight redesign of the in-product start page (the page you get to if you select Help from the menu of Firefox itself). This test is part of a bigger goal to reduce the number of people that leave the Firefox Support website immediately after visiting the start page — the so-called “bounce rate” of the page.

There can be many different reasons why people leave a website without interacting with it. When it comes to a support website, one of those reasons can be that the website isn’t helpful enough, or doesn’t provide sufficient instructions on how it should be used. This is something we are trying to minimize on SUMO so the support platform becomes as easy to understand as possible.

In order to improve the current start page, our first step was to figure out how people are using it today and identify areas where we could improve it. chofmann dug up a lot of the initial research about common web design mistakes which our start page was suffering from, and proposed some ideas on how we could use those insights when redesigning the page. chofmann and I then sat down and brainstormed about how we could improve the page, after which I created a simple mockup of our ideas.

Before we could actually test our ideas, we needed to turn the mockup into a polished web page that we would feel comfortable showing to our users, so we turned to Mozilla’s master of design and creativity, John Slater, who connected us with web designer Naz Hamid. The result of our collaboration can be seen below:

The new start page. Click on the image to see a version of it with notes explaining the differences between the current start page.

The test turned out to be successful. With the new start page:

• More people used the search box (+1.3%), which is the best way to use SUMO to find the solution to your problem.
• Fewer people left the site immediately without interacting with it (-0.5%), which means that more people are able to get their problem solved.

For the full report and many interesting insights about how people interact with this new page versus the current page, read the original blog post based on the full analysis of the A/B test by Ken Kovash and Mozilla intern Eric Hergenrader: Improving a User’s Experience with Firefox Support (part II).

Our effort to improve the support experience for our users will of course not end with this test. It’s an ongoing process and a continued focus of the SUMO team to make our support platform as easy to understand and use for as many users as possible.

When looking at the results of our test, it should be noted that the bounce rate is still very high (86%). As I mentioned earlier, there could be many other reasons why people quickly leave the website. One reason, that I suspect plays an important role here, is the fact that you can reach Firefox Support simply by pressing F1 on your keyboard. My theory is that many people accidentally do this when typing on a web page, leading to many unwanted visits to Firefox Support.

The most common SUMO bookmark?

That is one of our next things to test on SUMO: among the people that visit Firefox Support by pressing F1 on the keyboard, how many people close the website right away? Are the people that visit the site by selecting the Help option in the menu more interactive?

We will have the answers to these questions soon.

Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate 2 has been released, which means that you can now start updating screenshots in the knowledge base for Firefox 3.5! As a quick reminder, here are the guidelines on updating screenshots for 3.5:

• Screenshoots should only be shown for the specific the operating system. If it’s a Windows screenshot, make sure it only shows for Windows users. The existence of Windows screenshots gives Mac users the wrong impression that the article content only applies to Windows. To make content only display for certain operating systems and versions of Firefox, the instructions are in the contributor page called Using SHOWFOR.
• Don’t let the total size of all screenshots in the article (including all operating systems) get above 200K. Crop or resize whenever possible; and if you resize the image, save it as a jpg file. If you need to remove previous images, remove in this order:
  1. Firefox 2.0/Mac
  2. Firefox 2.0/Linux (although there shouldn’t be any)
  3. Firefox 2.0/Windows
  4. Firefox 3.0/Mac
  5. Firefox 3.0/Linux (although there shouldn’t be any)
  6. Firefox 3.0/Windows
• After updating screenshots on an article, update the Firefox 3.5 article tracker page so we know which articles are done.

Of course, the rest of the guidelines on our Adding screenshots page always apply. For most articles, any screenshots of the Options window will need updating because the Privacy icon has changed; and screenshots of the tab bar will also need to be updated because the New Tab button has moved since Firefox 3.0. If you have any questions, just post them in the Firefox 3.5 knowledge base status update thread in the Contributors forum. Thanks a lot!

Sumo

• RC1 support status
  • Cww going to run queries on forum
  • One problem for people upgrading from beta to RC1 might lose all their passwords when they clear recent passwords [1]
  • zzxc reports that a minority of people in Live Chat are on 3.5
  • zzxc to do a Live Chat query
  • List of 3.5 forum threads
• Last week’s weekly support issues
  • Java freezes – lots of people having Java freezing, causing Firefox to hang. There is a JavaScript snippet that is being used on many web pages that seems to hang
  • Flash on OSX has gotten crashier [2]
• Weekly metrics
  • Malaysian locale is up and active!
  • More forum participation

Knowledge Base

• Crash article CSAT is up from 3.88 in May to 4.38 this month. Understandability has dropped to below 50%.
• New pages addressing l10n feedback from last year:
  • Approvers list
  • How we are different from other wikis
• Firefox 3.5 KB update
  • KB audit edits are backported to Updating articles for 3.5 page.
  • Now that RC2 is out everyone can update screenshots. Blog post is drafted.
  • Top localizers have been updating as well. de, fr, it, es, ja, nl average at over 90% on l10n Dashboard.

Forum

• bug 464906 happening again.
  • If you’re posting in the forum and run into this bug, please comment in the bug with the exact time that this happened!

Live Chat

• Top chat tags (all) (3.5 only), webmail problems way up last week
  • Top user experience tags
• 19 participants last week

Roundtable

• Support Firefox Day happening this Thursday!
  • Traffic coming from firstrun page of RC1
  • 61 signups so far
  • Cww to draft e-mail for Wednesday
  • Really cool SFD video by Ricmacas
• Firefox Crashes article is a little confusing. Cww talked to Austin King about how we could connect SUMO with crash stats page for a specific crash. cilias and cww to discuss how to word it so it’s clear.
• Web Chat client status?
  • zzxc: Got some of it done last week. Should have a demo ready on a test server this week. Will post access info in the Contributors forum.
• cilias has blog post in need of review. Cww to review it.

One issue that sometimes confuses Knowledge Base contributors is knowing what levels of permission each user group on SUMO has. For instance, someone may be able to edit one category or articles, but not another. We now have documented it in a Group permissions page, which you can find linked on the Contributor Home Page.

In short, if you are registered you are considered a contributor. The Approvers group are contributors who have reached the point where they can be trusted on the system. The locale leaders group are contributors who are in charge of the support localization effort for a specific locale.

As part of our response to localizer feedback, we want to make sure the differences are listed and available for everyone to see. If you have any questions or suggestions, please comment on this blog post or in the Contributors forum. Thanks!

Last week, the fixes for SUMO 1.1 were applied to support.mozilla.com. The big news: SUMO now supports screencasts! A screencast is a video recording of a computer screen. In the same way that images of a computer screen (i.e. screenshots) are helpful in illustrating what Firefox support instructions are referring to, screencasts go a step further by showing users what the actions of those instructions look like.

Firefox 3.0.x users will be able to view screencasts in Flash format, but we also support the open video format called Ogg/Theora. Firefox 3.5 users will be able to view Ogg/Theora videos without the need for a plugin. For more information about open video, read In Support of Open Video.

What makes screencasts on SUMO especially great is that the SUMO knowledge base is a wiki. Adding a screencast to an article can be done by anyone! (That means you!) We have provided a tutorial on adding screencasts to the knowledge base, with a list of software you can use to create them. Adding of screencasts is fully integrated with the article editor; so if you know how to edit a knowledge base article, you know how to add a screencast. If you need any help adding screencasts, you can always ask in the Contributors forum. And the next time you’re having trouble explaining something about how to use Firefox, you’ll be able to show them.

When Firefox 3.5 launches later this month, we expect it to be really popular. After all, it’s the culmination of many months of very hard work from everyone in the Mozilla community. As with any major release, some users may need help transitioning from Firefox 3.0 to Firefox 3.5 or are using Firefox for the first time: whether it’s needing help with updating add-ons or using the many new features or even possibly a release-day issue. At support.mozilla.com, we’re hoping to provide friendly, prompt and personal support to each of these new Firefox 3.5 users through our knowledge base, forums and live chat service so they can get their questions answered and can start enjoying their brand new browser as quickly as possible. This is where you come in. We’d love to have experienced Firefox users and Mozilla community members (like you!) join the dedicated support community for the first week or two after the final Firefox 3.5 release and help these users.

There are a number of ways to help. If you’d like to work with users in real time over live chat, you’ll need to get the Spark client or you can use any jabber client and be available as a resource to our contributors. Just as important is answering questions on the support forums. To get started, simply register for an account and start posting. To join in what’s sure to be an exciting community atmosphere and keep on top of the latest issues and problem, just join us in the #sumo IRC channel on irc.mozilla.org. That’s also a good place to go if you need help with any of the above.

In addition to helping our users, this is also a great opportunity to interact with some of the hundreds of millions of Firefox users worldwide and share with them the excitement of getting a new browser. And it’s lots of fun.

With Firefox 3.5 rolling off the presses, it’s time for the long-awaited Support Firefox Day. We’re planning on having the event June 25th at 10 AM PDT (1 PM EDT).

At this event, we’ll be talking about Firefox 3.5, supporting the fastest Firefox ever and how Firefox support has grown along with the browser. There will be a preview of some of the new Firefox 3.5 features, with live demos and Q&A. We’ll also be going over the new screencasts feature in SUMO as well as some tips and resources for helping. At the end of the session, we’ll all get together and spend a couple hours answering questions on the support forums. If you’ve never done Firefox support before or are just curious to learn about how it works at Mozilla, this is a fun and interactive way to get involved.

You can get all the details and sign up for the event at the Support Firefox Day main page.

See you there!

A few days ago, the SUMO community got together to polish the Firefox 3 Manual created by the amazing FLOSS Manuals community and make it ready for publishing. It was a very successful effort and we now have a manual for Firefox 3 that we can be very proud of!

What many people (outside of Italy, at least) might not know is that our new Firefox 3 Manual isn’t the first manual for Firefox produced. In fact, back in 2006, Underpass, tittoproject, and miki64 from the Mozilla Italia community wrote a Firefox manual entirely written in Italian, based on their strong experiences supporting users in their local forum. Nothing similar existed at the time, and the purpose of this manual was to provide solutions to some of the most common issues for Firefox users so fewer people had to visit the forum — just like SUMO works today!

The Italian Firefox manual is called FireFAQ and is available for download in pdf format. It was downloaded by over 30,000 people in the first 10 days and received very good reviews! Later, Mozilla Italia also wrote ThunderFAQ. The content of both manuals are released under the CC license, just like the Knowledge Base articles on SUMO.

Simone Lando (yes, that’s Underpass, one of the authors of the Italian Firefox manual!) wrote to tell me that when they had the opportunity to translate the SUMO KB contents, they decided not to update their manual anymore and instead focus entirely on SUMO. However, the experiences they gained by writing the FireFAQ manual proved to be very important for their excellent team work on SUMO today, which I think is fantastic to hear.

I am very excited that Mozilla Italia will attend to the EU Inter-Community Meetup in Geneva this weekend, where they will share more about their experiences with Firefox support and SUMO. Definitely expect a blog post about the inter-community meetup soon.