SUMO Blog

One of the most frustrating thing for users is to have Firefox crash on them. As we’ve discussed before, we’ve been writing a series of articles to document the top crashes and get them searchable by crash signature.

Just documenting the top 50 crash signatures will greatly improve the experience of users coming to SUMO. It will also help give us somewhere to point users to from the forums or live chat. Towards that end, we’ll be having a one-day sprint to write these articles and get them into the knowledge base and we could use your help!

On September 3rd, we’re going to get together to write as many of these crash articles as we can. We’ll have members from Mozilla’s QA team as well as platform and branch development teams on hand over IRC to help with understanding crash bugs or stacks and answer any questions you may have about the crashes. We’ll be tracking our progress on this page.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Sumo

• Weekly metrics
  • “cookies” is the most popular search term
  • http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Websites+say+cookies+are+blocked
    • On that article, for the question “Did this article solve a problem you had with Firefox?”, 111 people votes yes last week, 160 voted no
  • Not clear why people are having this problem recently — keeping eyes and ears open
  • cilias to parse through the article feedback of Websites say cookies are blocked to see if we can get any clues there
  • Live Chat: 25% of all cookie issues were about Yahoo, all were fixed by clearing the cookies
• Last week’s weekly support issues

Knowledge Base

• Attn: bug 505356 “Open all external links in KB articles in new window/tab” -Milos
  • Annoying when you read a support article, and you want to read a .. right-click
• Bookmarks reorganization — Bo is going to start filing bugs this week for new task-specific articles.
• Thanks to Bo, all top 5+ crash articles are in the KB. One new one this week. Big thanks to Bo!
  • cilias to test searches to make sure they work (including non-en-US locales)
  • cww to see how we can add “crash” to the Crash Report form as an OR search, to ensure that the generic “Firefox Crashes” article is always included in the results
• This week we’ll focus on getting the Bookmarks and Cookies articles split.
• KB CSAT took a dive in March, but I don’t know the cause
  • There were three firedrills in April, which was the second month of drop, but that doesn’t explain March
  • djst to ask Patrick and Ken about this to see if there are other similar drops in March-April other than SUMO CSAT
• PRD draft for KB article requests, tracking, and discussion. (Discussion thread)
• Looking for feedback from localizers: Simplifying how to translate articles.
• Probable change in screencast/screenshot policy. Have a look. Give your feedback. [1]
• Sumodev stuff for anyone who wants to test on support-stage:
  • Email notification when an edit is made/approved/rejected (with comments). bug 446082
  • Reviewers now set “Mark other translations as out of date” instead of editors. bug 469188

Forum

• Writing guidelines for forum moderators (draft)
• Forum search currently filters by locale, which is rather pointless since we only have one locale and it wouldn’t be able to distinguish other languages even if someone e.g. wrote a post in German
  • cww to test and file bug

Live Chat

• Top tags from last week
  • Crash was the top issue all of last week
• Web client demo – currently in testing
  • Goal is to have Milestone 1 complete this week
  • zzxc to make sure the page works and then SUMO team will test. Then we can get more testing from Live Chat people once we know it at least work relatively well.
• Canned responses have been updated with new common issues and troubleshooting steps
  • To update this week http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Introduction+to+Live+Chat

Roundtable

• SFD will be a KB writing sprint on 9/3
  • Blog post about it to be posted today
• Laura wants to know if we should link to SUMO articles on the Plugin Checkup page.
  • Let’s definitely link to SUMO, but let’s make sure to review the target articles to make sure they’re up to date.

Sumo

• Weekly metrics
  • CSAT increase is due to Private Browsing article which is very popular and consistently gets a >90% satisfaction score
  • Has the CSAT increased overall if Private Browsing is excluded? Cww to find out
• Last week’s weekly support issues
  • Moved it to a Google Doc

Knowledge Base

• Still need direction re-organizing the Bookmarks documentation (Contributors Forum thread). Summary of new/re-organized articles at end of thread.
• New articles: Backing up and restoring bookmarks, Printing a web page
  • Renamed article: ‘Firefox takes a long time to start up’ is now ‘Firefox takes several minutes to start up’ the thread
• We should split the cookies article to fit the different cookie related search terms (enable cookies, delete cookies, etc.)
  • General consensus is that it’s a good idea
• djst: Proposed idea to change naming scheme for KB articles to questions, e.g. from “Clearing private data” to “How do I clear my private data?”
  • Other support sites use this scheme (e.g. Apple, Skype, Yahoo)
  • Works better with our terminology on the site (”search for the answers you need”, “Ask a new question”, etc)
  • Would require a lot of work
• Milos: Also show related questions at the bottom of an article?
  • We already show related articles in the sidebar — maybe it’s not very discoverable?
  • An old idea that’s been around for quite a while is to offer related articles when someone votes “No” on “Did this article solve a problem you had with Firefox?”
    • Before we go ahead and do this, we should cheng the top 10-15 articles and make sure that they all have sensible related articles.
• Still need people to write the top crash articles.

Forum

• Welcome to our new contributor Richard Hennings!

Live Chat

• Graph of last week’s tag data (raw data)
• Discussion about changes to the Trainees queue
  • Object of the changes is to reduce the differences between new helpers and “approved” helpers.
• Web client status
  • Proof of concept demo on VPN server — got it to bootstrap.
  • Working on Milestone 1 features — goal is to get those done in SUMO 1.4 (Q3).
  • Milestone 1 will be a basic web-based Live Chat client that will work for normal helpers (but not for room monitors)

Roundtable

• Next SFD is a sprint on crash articles (good, bad, other ideas?)
  • Idea is to do a focused sprint to get people from SUMO and QA together to work on crash articles
  • A little more low key compared to previous SFDs with video presentations etc.
  • The other option would be localization
  • Let’s do the crash sprint first and then l10n! Since we won’t be focusing as heavily on presentation this time and more on the idea of getting together and working on something as a team, we should be able to do this with less time needed for planning

Helping users troubleshoot crashes has always been a hard thing to document in the knowledge base. We try to help the user better define the circumstances of their crash, then list possible causes and solutions for those circumstances. An (obviously) unintended consequence is that there is so much information to digest, it confuses users.

The problem is that if Firefox crashes, it could be for any number of reasons. The range of causes and volume of troubleshooting is so great that we end up doing more to try help the user navigate crash documentation, than offer a solution. In most cases the solution is vague and not very helpful, which confuses users even more.

Each Firefox crash reported to Mozilla using the Mozilla Crash Reporter has a crash ID and lists the type of crash, called the crash signature. Usually, each crash signature has a much more specific cause/solution. Instead of asking users to define each circumstance of their crash, they can get to the solution more quickly if we ask for the crash signature, then provide a document for each crash sig.

What we’ve done is turned our Firefox crashes article into a tutorial on accessing your crash report via about:crashes. At the top right corner of each crash report on crash-stats.mozilla.com, you’ll notice that there is a [Get Help] button. What that does is search support.mozilla.com for the crash signature from the report.

By creating an article for each crash signature, and putting the crash signature in the article content, the Get Help button on crash-stats.mozilla.com will provide the user a link to the article that addresses their specific type of crash.

Naturally, there are a lot of crash signatures. We can’t provide an article for every crash. However, we can get a list of the most common crash signatures, and try to make sure the 10 most common crashes have articles in the knowledge base. Ever since Firefox 3.5 was released, we have been keeping an eye on the top Firefox 3.5.x crashes, and adding them to a list here.

What we need now is people to draft an article for each crash sig. There is a bug link for each crash sig on the list, that contains details about known causes/solutions for each crash. If you need help creating articles, we have a contributor page about creating articles. For any further help, just ask in the Contributors forum.

Since the SUMO project was created, we have been in regular contact with non-English Mozilla communities to unify our support efforts. User support is one of the easiest ways to get involved with Firefox, because there is a direct connection with users. As we get more new contributors in different languages, we need to connect those new contributors to the already existing non-English communities.

In February, we asked support localizers to add links to their local forums when localizing the Ask a question page, which tells users where to go if they cannot find the answer to their question in the knowledge base. We would like to do something similar with the How to Contribute page, which is where users interested in contributing to Firefox Support are directed. In the localized versions of the How to Contribute page, we can not only direct users to the appropriate local community sites, but include info for new contributors to directly contact their community leaders.

We have been working with the Italian locale leader to create a localized version of the How to Contribute page. In fact, it is now up for everyone to see.

We would like to all localized versions of the How to Contribute page to follow the example set on the Italian page. Here are the main points:

• A note was added after the first paragraph inviting new contributors to their local community site.
• Links to pages about helping in the support.mozilla.com forum and live chat are marked as English-only.
• The contact info section is divided into two parts: the first is contact info links for the contributor’s locale, and the second is for the English links.

As usual, if you have any questions, just post in the Contributors forum.

Thousands of questions are asked on the support forum each week, making it one of our primary ways to help Firefox users around the world. For contributors, we can significantly ease workflow and make helping on the forums a lot simpler by improving the interface. In September, we have a milestone scheduled (SUMO 1.4) to address some of the primary issues with usability on the forums. These are based off of suggestions we got in our survey from last quarter (full results) as well as discussions in the contributors forum and over IRC. Here are some of the things we’re looking forward to:

• Thread filters that help you answer questions. We’ll be adding the ability (for registered and logged in contributors) to filter for questions with no replies, with no proposed solution or where the original contributor has come back asking for more help. This lets contributors focus on just the threads that need help rather than having to flip through threads that other people have already replied in.
• Advanced search. With new search features, you’ll be able to search for threads based on users who posted in them, date, status as well as sort your results in a variety of ways. Finding threads you answered previously just got a lot easier!
• Better guidance for users asking questions. One of the most frustrating things about helping on the forums is that users will ask questions with very little information and you have to take guesses on what they’re trying to say or give broad all-encompassing answers. With a clearer, guided question form, questions asked by users will contain more detail and be easier to answer in a straightforward way. Also, once users finish asking their question, we’ll be making it much clearer how to get their answers via email or by bookmarking the thread.
• New and improved thread statuses. Now when you scan through the list of forum threads, you’ll be able to quickly see the threads which have a solution proposed and which need more information from the question asker. We’re also adding a status for questions that aren’t related to Firefox. If you’re a moderator and you come across a thread about Thunderbird, Windows, Office or general web development, marking it as not being about Firefox means that other contributors will know to skip over it.

These are just four of the dozens of improvements we’ll be making to the forum experience. We’ll be blogging again with some more features to expect in this release as well as ways you can help out testing these changes.

Sumo

• Weekly metrics
  • Why is “Cookies” a very popular search term?
    • Some sites will tell users to enable cookies. “Enable cookies” is the next most popular search term containing the word “cookies”.
• Last week’s weekly support issues
  • Now being hosted on a Google doc.
  • Pop-ups not being blocked is an emerging issue. A lot of comments on Pop-up Blocker article (but not all) specify that the pop-ups are about NetFlix.
  • Need to update Right-clicking does not work article to tell users that the cause is the Yahoo Toolbar.

Knowledge Base

• Would like to see some action on re-organizing the Bookmarks documentation (Contributors Forum thread). Drafts of new task-specific articles have been produced – how best to integrate their content (read thread for some discussion)? -Bo
• Edits made to Installing Firefox on Windows last week. We’ll check the poll data on it this week, to see if the edit was an improvement.
• Localized version of HTC page is almost ready.
• FTP, _PR_MD_SEND, Pages that use the Flash plugin crash on Mac articles are all public.
  • 6 top crash articles still need to be drafted.
  • My blog post about crash documentation is still waiting for review.
• Interesting SUMOdev stuff on the staging server for those who want to test:
  • Email notifications for KB rejections/approvals. bug 446082
  • Warning when creating articles with bad characters. bug 465029
  • Localized articles inherit additional category info from en-US version. bug 487598

Forum

• Request from devs for most common signatures. I’m working on a way to get that automatically

Live Chat

• Common tags from last week
  • Most common questions were crashes, Firefox won’t start, add-on issues, slow/hang issues, and firewall problems
    • For “wontstart”, we suspect that it is malware. Need to add new solution, telling users to do a clean install. The article needs to be cleaned up.
• Discussion in the contributors forum about replacing the “trainees” workgroup
• Ongoing work on the web-client. Trying to get it finished soon.

Roundtable

• Support Firefox Day: survey came back with lots of people liking the videos but hating the video quality.
• Should I (Cheng) blog about Forum UX upcoming changes?
  • Yes. It would be good to point out some of the major changes and link to a bug list. It might even be worth doing more than one blog post, to keep everyone up to date on the progress.
• Should Cheng blog about metrics gathered from telling people to update Flash.
  • If you’re just posting data for the sake of posting data, no. If there’s a lesson learnt from the data that we can use in the future, yes.