SUMO Blog

Activity in the SUMO has increased rapidly over the past year and our community has really grown! Now we have this blog, a contributors forum and a newsgroup. There’s all sorts of work being done with users, finding common issues, writing help documentation and developing the many features on the website and tons more in the works in Bugzilla. With all this stuff going on, naturally, we figured a twitter feed would be a great way of letting community members know about things as-they-happen — in short 140-character bites. The feed will announce blog posts and discussion threads that may be of broader interest as well as give announcements that may be useful to SUMO contributors such as new KB articles, common issues or just to give a welcome to new people.

This is still very experimental and we’d love to get some feedback as to what you want to hear about. Either way, it’s casual, it’s informative and hopefully, it’s also a fun way to keep up to date with all the great things going on in the wide world of SUMO support.

If you’re new to twitter, it’s a webapp that lets users quickly update others with short messages and statuses. If you already have an account, just go to the moz_sumo page and click Follow! and you’ll be updated as to all the great things going on in the world of SUMO. If you would rather not get twitter, you can always subscribe to the RSS feed in your favorite reader or with a live bookmark and follow things right in your browser.

A few days ago, we blogged that we’ll be having a contributors meeting Monday Jan 12th. I just wanted to write this to say that I’m really excited to hear what everyone has to say about improving SUMO in 2009. We’ll be discussing the year past but focusing on the year ahead. So everyone bring your ideas, thoughts, and brilliant plans! A quick reminder about the meeting:

Monday Jan 12th 2 PM PST/5 PM EST/10 PM GMT:

• California: 650-903-0800 then extension 92, conference number 280#
• Toronto: 416-848-3114 then extension 92, conference number 280#
• Toll-free (US): 800-707-2533 then password 369, conference number 280#
• Skype (free worldwide): +18007072533 then password 369, conference number 280#

The backchannel (where we post links and share text) is #sumo on irc.mozilla.org and our agenda and notes is on the Mozilla wiki.

If you can’t make the time, never fear, just tell us your thoughts in IRC at any time or come to one of our weekly phone meetings Mondays at 10 AM PST/1 PM EST/6 PM GMT.

This Monday, Jan 12th, we’ve moved the regular SUMO meeting and are inviting all SUMO contributors to call in to discuss their thoughts on the SUMO project.  Volunteers, contributors and helpers are a vital part of the SUMO community and we wanted to make sure that there was time set aside some time to hear your views on what we as a community can do.  SUMO isn’t just for users of Firefox, it’s also our community.  Most importantly, this meeting is a chance to get together and bounce around ideas and thoughts about how to make SUMO even better.

The call is scheduled to go from 2 PM PST/5 PM EST/10 PM GMT  and last for about 90 minutes (although we’ll certainly keep it freeform and extend it if needed).  Here are some things that we are looking to cover:

1. A quick wrapup of the past year: Knowledge base, Forums, Live Chat, Support Firefox Days.   What happened, (SUMO got started!) and what you felt went well/could have been done better.
2. Goals for 2009.  What do you want to see from SUMO over the next year and what projects would you like to take a lead on?
3. Firefox 3.1.  Mozilla Firefox 3.1 is being released soon and so SUMO will have to expand its coverage.  We’ll talk briefly about the major changes that users will be seeing and answer questions about what is happening on our end to prepare for it.
4. Open discussion about SUMO (on whatever you want).

That’s all that we have planned.  If you’re interested in improving SUMO or working more in-depth in user support, this is the perfect place to get started.  If you can’t make this meeting or want to get even more involved, feel free to join us for any of our weekly meetings which are Mondays at 1 PM EST/10 AM PST.  (You’re always welcome to join!)

Phone call details (pick one):

• California: 650-903-0800 then extension 92, conference number 280#
• Toronto: 416-848-3114 then extension 92, conference number 280#
• Toll-free (US): 800-707-2533 then password 369, conference number 280#
• Skype (free): +18007072533 then password 369, conference number 280#

The backchannel (where we post links and share text) is #sumo on irc.mozilla.org

I hope to see you all there.

Cheng.

Note: We’ll be moving the start of LiveChat hours for Monday to after this meeting so there won’t be any conflict.

As most readers of this blog are already aware, Mozilla’s community-powered user support project SUMO was launched to address the need for an official and centralized support channel for Firefox that could scale to match the rapidly growing user base. While the ground work started back in 2007, the project really took off in 2008.

Looking back at the achievements we’ve made over the year makes me humble. Here are just some of them:

• We got first-hand insights about our Firefox users. With a combination of article polls and traditional website metrics like page hits and search & navigation patterns, we now have a deeper understanding of what our users are saying about Firefox. Every week, we provide a list of the most commonly reported Firefox problems, which is very useful information for the Firefox development, QA, and marketing teams.
• We grew our community. In 2008, the SUMO community doubled in size to over 50 active contributors per week. We still need to grow in order to keep up with the 200+ million user base, but it’s exciting to see that our Mozilla community is starting to understand the importance of user support.
• SUMO development took off. The SUMO development “team” went from what was essentially a one man show — Nelson Ko from the TikiWiki community — to an actual team of people. We also got a formal development lead: Laura Thomson from Mozilla’s web development team. We got high class QA attention from Stephen Donner. This all enabled us to move forward in a much quicker pace, which was something we were in great need of. In fact, we will need to grow even more to keep up with the ambitious plans for 2009. Interested in hacking on SUMO? Let us know!
• We launched the Support Forum. To create a support experience where the most common problems can be solved in the Knowledge Base and everything else in user to user support solutions, we launched the Support Forum as the first step to complete what later became known as the support funnel. Today, around 1,500 support questions are answered by our SUMO community every week.
• We launched Live Chat. Actually, Live Chat had its virgin session exactly one year ago, New Year’s Eve 2007, and it was immediately being picked up by lots of users and helpers, much thanks to some press attention that caught us by (pleasant) surprise.
• The Knowledge Base became localized. Initially, the Knowledge Base articles were only available in English. This changed in 2008, as we enabled support for multiple languages and got help from our incredible localization communities around the world. Some of the more active locales include French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and German.
• We moved Firefox’s product help to SUMO. Starting with Firefox 3, the product help is now hosted online. As a result of the effort of moving the content over to SUMO, we engaged with Mozilla’s large localization community. With their help, we were able to translate the updated product help articles into 18 languages before the Firefox 3 launch.
• Last but not least, we became helpful. The Firefox Support website currently helps roughly 30,000 users every month solving their Firefox problems. Although that is a pretty impressive number in itself, it’s actually very conservative since we’re only counting the users that took the time to let us know that their problem was solved.

I’d like to thank everyone who contributed to the SUMO project in 2008. Without your help, we wouldn’t have been where we are today. Thank you!

Of course, the fun doesn’t end on this last day of 2008. We have lots of things planned for 2009, so please stay with us! I’ll blog about our plans for 2009 shortly. Until then: Happy New Year!!

Photos by Eskilstuna photographer & journalist David Naylor.

One week after our fourth Support Firefox Day (SFD for short), it’s time for reflection! This time around, Cheng was doing most of the work of pulling it all together, as well as hosting a fair share of the individual sessions throughout the day. That said, it was very much a display of great team work where everyone from the SUMO team was involved to ensure that the day would become a success.

Chris hosted the localization sessions during the European and American time slots, while Cheng was covering for Chris when he was enjoying his good night’s sleep during the Asian time slot. Matthew worked hard on the technical backend, making sure we had a decent landing page and were properly set up with Mogulus and other technologies used throughout the day. We were also privileged with Asa’s great technical expertise during the American session.

Initially, the focus of the event was going to be 100% localization. However, before the agenda for the day was set in stone, Mitchell contacted me about getting the SUMO community involved with the Mozilla 2010 goals discussions she had initiated on her blog. She asked me if I wanted to lead a discussion about this and asked what would be the most appropriate channel for such a discussion, and I immediately thought that the upcoming SFD would be a good opportunity.

Mitchell and I sat down a few weeks ago when I was visiting the Mountain View office to discuss how we wanted to go about with this discussion, and after a few ideas being bounced back and forth, we agreed that we would primarily be using IRC for the discussion, but also to use video to kickstart it and explain why Mozilla’s goals are important for everyone in the community (since it’s really the community that has the power to make our goals become our reality).

The Asian and European sessions were hosted by Cheng and me, respectively. Since Cheng lives in Mountain View, we thought it would be cool if he could actually broadcast the Mozilla 2010 American session live with Mitchell. If you missed this discussion, you can still watch it from the SFD4 start page. In the video area, click “On Demand” and then choose the Mozilla goals 2010 session. A summary of the thoughts and ideas that were gathered throughout the course of the day can be found on this wiki page.

It was an interesting challenge to split this SFD up into three separate time slots for the Asian, European, and American time zones. For me personally, it was pretty exhausting since I chose to attend to the full day, which meant that I started my work day at 5:30 am and ended it at (I think) around 11:30 pm.

But more generally, we were surprised to see that there were more people attending from Europe during the American session than there were during the actual European session. Although when you think of it, it actually makes sense, since many people in our community has daytime jobs that makes it hard for them to participate in the middle of the day, making an event starting at 7 pm more natural to attend to.

It was great to see so many people getting together in our IRC channel #sumo, both existing and new community members. I personally think this is the most important part of a SFD — to ensure that people get together in real time to meet, chat, and have fun. We had lots of that during the day (I need to dig up a good IRC quote from the day to show an example!).

A huge thanks to everyone that participated, both actively and passively, last Friday! It was a great experience and we all enjoyed it very much. And of course, a special thanks to Mitchell and Asa for setting aside time from your busy schedules to join us in making the day a Great Success!

Over the past two months we have been gathering feedback and ideas on how to improve the article editing experience in the Support Knowledge Base, to make Knowledge Base features more understandable and easier to use.

As part of the ongoing work for design a new editor for knowledge base articles, I’ve taken the feedback we have received and created two XHTML mockups (without images).

• Editing a staging copy
• Creating a new article

Some information not in the mockups:

The “Insert Image” toolbar button will pop up a prompt for:

• Image uploader (mandatory)
• Image height
• Image width
• Alignment

The “SHOWFOR” button will trigger a drop-down, that includes

• Windows
• Mac
• Linux
• Windows and Mac
• Windows and Linux
• Mac and Linux
• –separator–
• Firefox 3.1
• Firefox 3.0
• Firefox 3.0 and 3.1
• Firefox 2

(when Fx2 support ceases, we should remove the last two)

The “Dynamic content” button will trigger a dropdown that includes all content labels for the language assigned to the article.

These mockups should illustrate how the new article editor would eliminate the need to know tikiwiki syntax, make all features available in one toolbar, and provide more in-depth explanations for each option and how it should be used.

If you have any questions or feedback, you can post in the Contributors forum thread. Thanks!

Support Firefox day is an event that the contributors with the Firefox Support project (support.mozilla.com or SUMO) hold to introduce new people to working with Support, help people with any questions they may have and have a little fun.

The next Support Firefox Day will focus on localization of the Support project. Primarily, in this case, localization is translation of support articles into a number of languages for our users worldwide. Firefox is available in over 30 languages and with so many users, support documentation is also needed in all these languages. We are also leading a discussion with the SUMO community about Mozilla’s goals for 2010 as Mitchell  has been blogging about recently.  Even though the discussion is about Mozilla as a whole, it’s important that everyone who’s helped with SUMO or looks to start helping with SUMO participates — you’re all members of the greater Mozilla community.  Whether you work with the knowledge base, help on the forums or are active on Live Chat, we’d like you to join in and offer your input during this roundtable discussion.

While the final schedule is still being worked out, we’re hoping to work the following into each three hour slot:

• Presentations on how to localize SUMO articles, finding articles that need to be translated and how to keep up to date with changes and get changes approved by others in your locale.
• A roundtable on Mozilla goals for 2010 and how user support and our contributors ties in with those goals.
• An open meet-and-greet. This will give you all a chance to find other people interested in Firefox Support in your language and coordinate your efforts. This includes getting translation questions answered by a locale leader.  Some of our most active contributors will also be available to answer questions about SUMO in general.

Due to the global nature of localization, rather than having one large event that spans a full day as we have had in the past, we’ll be having a few smaller events (about 3 hours long) with a slot for our Asian contributors, one for our European contributors and one for those in the Americas. Primarily, the event will take place on Friday, November 21st, 2008 in your local time zone. (Of course, while the slots were designed with certain locales in mind, they’re open to everyone; discussion will be in English.)

Our three sessions are at the following times:

• Friday Nov 21st, 5:00 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)

We’ll be hosting the event, as we always do from our Support Firefox Day page where all the information will be posted as it comes out.  We’re asking you to start spreading the word in your various communities and among your friends and get the word out.  We’re also looking for help putting the event together and for some volunteers to lead sessions (especially in Asia).  If you’re interested in user support or would like to help us, please respond in this forum thread.

Thanks and I hope to see you on the 21st!

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…

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!