Superpowers don’t come easy, so I’ve been participating in lots of exercises to increase my strength.

I attended a brainstorming session about use cases for mobile Firefox during my first week. We discussed everything from educational tasks, such as learning the recipes for a variety of mixed drinks, to traditional business communication needs. It was a passionate dialogue about mobile users, their characteristics, and how those characteristics drive needs on the mobile web.

There were a few takeaways from this think tank that I think we should consider when designing mobile support:

• Every piece of data is useful and precious
• Sometimes a data plan is too expensive and free wifi is not readily available
• The internet can cause fatigue

I keep these in mind while planning the project to achieve SUMO’s mobile goal for this quarter, to make Android a top tier platform on FIrefox for Mobile Help. The plan proposes development of new knowledge base articles to describe Troubleshooting, Privacy & Security, and Advanced topics along with documenting new features. I also plan on making some changes to existing content to optimize for small screens, improve visibility of support resources and grow our community of experts.

Do join SUMO and participate in developing this content and in answering user questions with me. It has been incredibly rewarding to help new Firefox for Android users and I think you’ll enjoy it too. Just register and add some feedback on the Discussion tab for any article that you think needs some work, every extra voice will improve the final articles a great deal.

Firefox for Android is really new, so if you want to influence the direction of this technology, you should join in the conversation on the #mobile channel, I’m michelleluna, so say hello! All of the development and test engineers along with user experience designers, marketing and product managers and new folks like me hang out there.

If you’re in San Francisco, join our next meetup where we talk about Firefox for Android and enjoy brewery delights.

This is a quick reminder about our test day for private messaging and group dashboards today, Friday, July 8th, from 3pm to 12pm UTC. We want to test the recently finished implementation of private messaging and the groups dashboards on SUMO, and will meet on IRC, in #testday (please note, it’s not #sumo).

Especially for private messaging it’s important to have many people on IRC at the same time. So if you can manage it, please join us between 3pm and 7pm UTC , but of course we will be around all day. Also, we have a test plan ready, so you can systematically check if things are working as they should.

If you are a localizer, you can also request the group dashboard feature. This will add another tab to your dashboard and those of your team members. That tab will hold your localization dashboard and a message on top that you as the locale leader can change to message your team. Also, your localization group will get a profile page listing the locale leader and every member of the team. You can see here what the German localization group profile looks like.

For the groups dashboard I wrote a short tutorial that you can see here.

Please report any issues that you encounter on this etherpad so we can fix them quickly.

All info about the testday:

Date: Friday, July 8th
Time: 3pm to 12pm UTC
Place: IRC #testday (please note, it’s not #sumo)
Testplan: https://wiki.mozilla.org/QA/Execution/Web_Testing/SUMO/2.8
Feedback: http://etherpad.mozilla.com:9000/kitsune-groups-and-messages

Thanks, and hope to see you later today!

Starting today we will be beta testing the new groups and private messaging features of Kitsune. We want to start with a small number of people for now, so we are going to cap this at about ten. We will have a test day for everyone on July 8th. If you are interested in testing private messaging and giving feedback on it, please let me know in this thread on the support community forum and I’ll activate it for you.

If you are a localizer, you can also request the group dashboard feature. This will add another tab to your dashboard and those of your team members. That tab will hold your localization dashboard and a message on top that you as the locale leader can change to message your team. Also, your localization group will get a profile page listing the locale leader and every member of the team.

You can see here what the German localization group profile looks like.

For the groups dashboard I wrote a short tutorial that you can see here.

Private messaging should be fairly intuitive. Once the feature is activated, just click on “Inbox” on the upper right corner of the page. Make sure that you only message people who are listed in the forum thread for now.

Please report any issues that you encounter on this etherpad so we can fix them quickly.

And of course, please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks!
Kadir

Michael Verdi has create a special page that let’s you easily keep track of all the articles that we have changed between Firefox 4 and Firefox 5. If you are a localizer you should bookmark that page so you can see at a glance the upcoming changes for future versions of Firefox.

As always your Localization Dashboard is the most important metric to see what to localize or update next. If you keep the top 20 articles localized at all times you cover over 50% of all visits to the KB already. But with upcoming new Firefox versions we can sometimes predict that an article is going to be very popular after the release, even if it doesn’t show up on the Localization Dashboard yet. So we’ll make sure to inform everyone about those cases.

If you have any questions about the process, an update is unclear or you want to help localize support articles into your own language, please don’t hesitate to contact us in the community forums.

Last weekend was the second installment of the Balkans meeting, and this time it was much more hands-on oriented. We had the full day on Saturday to cover a whole range of subjects from SUMO, product L10n, QA to Add-on development. For SUMO this year was a year of changes in many aspects, and during my talk I used the chance to explain why we did what we did, and how we thought it would bring us closer to support each and every one of our 400 Million users worldwide.

The second half of the day was reserved for sprints and hands-on action. Since we had just released a brand new KB, this was an excellent opportunity to see the KB used in real live, and learn from the feedback. The participants worked mostly on the top 20 articles in the KB, which serve almost 50% of all visitors to the KB and have a really high benefit-cost ratio.

Particularly interesting was the feedback, most of it about the actual localization experience in the editor. Generally it was geared towards making the editor more user friendly (smaller fonts for more text, resizing of the editor window etc) and the localization experience smoother. In the latter case we are looking into a few ways to do that already, for example by providing a Google translated text as the base for the initial translation of the English text.

After a pretty solid 9 hours of work we headed for dinner in a traditional Slovenian Restaurant, with horse meat as a specialty. I didn’t try that, but my meal was delicious. There we also met our surprise guest for the evening, the new Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs, who was adopted as a Balkan member for his Hungarian heritage

Working hard during the SUMO sprint

After the hands-on the day before, Sunday was used for the goal setting process, which involved a review of the goals from the last time and their usefulness. The goal setting itself was pretty great, we had an etherpad where we collected the goals, the document was projected to the big screen then and live edited by a dozen people, which made for interesting discussions.

I’m happy to say that the Balkan communities decided to name the localization of the Top 20 SUMO articles into all Balkan languages as one of those goals, and I think the new KB had quite some influence here. There will be follow up calls to talk about the details of each goal, but all in all they look pretty good, and will surely give everyone enough to work on until the next Balkans meeting (I heard rumors about Athens, but who knows

My cell in Ljubljana

So, how did I end up in a cell? Well, that was thanks to Matjaz, our wonderful host from Slovenia. He organize a hostel for the participants, but not just any hostel, it was a former military prison, taken over by university students and turned into a hostel, with the cells left intact and designed by different architects. It’s considered one of the best hostels worldwide, and I can really recommend spending a night behind bars, it’s unusual to say the least

I’d like to thank everyone attending this years Balkan meeting, it was a pleasure to meet and work with you all, and special thanks to our host Mathjaz and the organizers, William and Milos, it was a productive and intense meeting, but with lots of opportunities for informal talks and get-togethers. I really enjoyed it, thanks for putting it all together!

We started working on our new SUMO Knowledge Base back in March and now, 9 months later, it’s finally here! We released our new KB to the public last night and it’s working great. Go check it out: http://support.mozilla.com. And come back for a localization sprint tomorrow (more about that below).

We are really excited, exhausted and extremely happy — this was a huge undertaking. After the months of planning and development, we spent the last few weeks testing the migration of thousands of articles to our new system. The good news is that all of that testing payed off. Thanks to everyone who contributed during the QA day, and other times, the migration went smooth, with no catastrophic problems whatsoever. Alas, no matter how much you test, you never catch all the issues. So, we are dedicating the next few days to finding and solving the little bugs we’ve found. Please let us know about any issues in #sumo or #sumodev on IRC or — better yet — file a bug so we can take care of it.

Localization Sprint

A new system always poses a lot of questions, especially for those who need to work with it. So we decided to have a Localization sprint to check our top articles and update or translate articles for Firefox 4. If you are a localizer, this gives you the chance to check your top 20 articles and report any issue to us right away. This way, we can try to solve it on the spot. It will also give you hands-on experience with the new KB for updating or translating articles for Firefox 4. And we’ll be ready on IRC to answer any questions about the syntax, templates (formerly, content blocks) or anything else. And we need your help, even if you’re not a localizer: All those newy imported articles need a search summary to show up on the search results page. Help us add those summaries.

Join us on Thursday, December 2nd. The sprint will start at 6am PST and last until 2pm PST. That’s 3pm to 11pm in Central Europe, or 2pm to 10pm UTC/GMT – yeah, we’re a global project

Looking forward to seeing you all and putting the new KB to the test!

I don’t believe I would be studying systems support without the inspiration and effort put in by the SUMO team. Not only have you inspired me to study for a qualification in IT, I have also been able to find a passion helping users and improving the web as a whole.

I can’t tell you how amazing it was to read that, so we thought you should learn more about Tom.

1. Tell as much as you’re willing about your “real” life.
My name is Tom Ellins and I am located in the United Kingdom studying systems support. I am a keen kayaker and photographer but my main hobby lies within Mozilla.

2. When and how did you become interested in computers? in Firefox?
Ive been interested in computers for as long as I can remember. One of my best memories is unboxing a Windows 95 PC as the first PC I owned myself. I first downloaded Firefox in 2006 after searching for a faster, more customizable browser.

3. When did you become involved in the Mozilla community? What’s your role there?
I first became involved in the Mozilla community when I accidentally visited SUMO, I followed the get involved links and have never looked back.
Since becoming involved in the Mozilla community almost 2 years ago my roles within it have changed multiple times. I started off helping within live chat and in the forums and quickly progressed to becoming a RM (Room Monitor for Live Chat, ed.) and forum moderator. After a period with SUMO I was invited into the QA and Web QA projects where I have written Selenium automated testcases and Litmus manual testcases alongside helping QA website releases. From QA I progressed onto community sites where I became the co-owner of Mozilla-uk.org (along with Tobias) which led me to my current role as a Calendar website peer. I still continue to contribute to my previous roles when time allows.

4. What version of Firefox do you regularly use? What add-ons? What’s your favorite add-on?
I run the latest 3.6.* public release to enable me to help with website QA and answer the most common questions from users on SUMO. I use too many addons to list but one of my all time favourites is ChatZilla which enables me to communicate with the rest of the Mozilla community via IRC.

5. What’s your fondest memory from the SUMO community, or from Mozilla overall?
That’s a tough question. My fondest memory must be the Firefox 3.6 release day. The whole community and SUMO team worked so hard to answer as many questions as possible and was a great team effort.

6. What luck have you had introducing new users to Firefox?
It’s sad to say that during my time in the Mozilla community I have not introduced many people to using Firefox apart from a few friends and family. Though saying that, I was part of the Mozilla contribute team for some time introducing new contributors to SUMO.

7. What would you like to see happen with Firefox in the future?
I would love to see a plusher UI to match the likes of Google Chrome.

8. If there was one thing you could tell all new Firefox users, what would it be?
It would have to be about all of the fantastic addons hosted over at http://addons.mozilla.org .

HD Ogg

The Mozilla Summit was amazing and this video doesn’t do it justice. There were so many cool things – science fair, world expo, dozens of breakout sessions, lightning talks and demos – that I didn’t even attempt to capture because I wanted to experience them. Instead, what I’ve got here is a few moments from the beginning and the end. It doesn’t sum up the full experience but I think it does represent the spirit of sharing and celebration.

The first mockup shows how the questions and replies themselves will look. As you can see, users are now given the option to vote that they have a certain problem as well as vote on whether replies are helpful. To make sure that useful replies don’t get lost after other posts, they’re being summarized below the question. We’ve also moved stuff like System information to the sidebar, adding in tags and related questions to help improve navigation between forum questions. This way, if you’re looking for help with something, you can easily find similar threads if the one you’re looking at doesn’t help. Also, if you’re answering this thread, you may find that you also know the answer to a related question.

We’ll also color certain replies differently: The chosen solution is highlighted in green, posts by the original question-asker are blue and other threads are white.

The second mockup shows how the thread listing will look. To make it easier to browse the forum and find questions you can help with, we’ve added tags, the number of “I have this problem” votes and most importantly a short summary to this view. You’re also shown if you’ve contributed to the thread already and what its status is. We’ve kept the filter buttons at the top, letting you view common views (most recent, solved only etc).

Chris Howse has made many more detailed mockups showing various views and button states. You can check them all out in the following two bugs:

• Mockups for the individual question view
• Mockups for the thread listing view

We hope you enjoyed this view into the future of the forums. What do you think? We’ll give another update as more development happens, so stay tuned.

It’s actually very simple to help people, too. But just to be on the safe side, we’ve prepared some instructions for how to get you started.

How to make one Firefox user happy per day:

1. Set aside two minutes of your time. Some tips for how to do that:
   • Stay away from pointless activities like Farmville or Mafia Wars (and avoid Facebook in general).
   • Skip reading that “fun” e-mail one of your colleagues just sent.
   • Don’t click this link. It’s not worth it, and no, you can’t even interact with the cat.
2. If you haven’t already, get a SUMO account by filling out the form on the registration page.
3. Scan the list of unanswered forum threads (btw, that’s a great page to bookmark) for a question you think you know the answer to. Click it and respond. That’s it!

Don’t even have two minutes to spare? Try looking for a question that has an obvious answer, like AOL hijacked my start page, posted earlier today (the solution is already documented).

Need help answering a question? No problem. We have a page of tips and resources that may be useful, or you can ask in the Contributors forum. Feel like taking a break? That’s cool, too. Go introduce yourself in the Off-Topic forum and hang out with your fellow Firefox contributors.

By the way, we’re currently working on a brand new forum system that will be faster, sexier and easier to use. Stay tuned for more details…