SUMO Blog

Since Live Chat started, over 1000 people have helped us in at least one chat, and over 200 have been regular helpers. We have answered almost 50,000 total chats (between 600 and 1000 each week), with 10 to 20 people answering chats weekly. As we get close to two years of offering Live Chat support, there are many great Live Chat community members that we would like to recognize. Tobias Markus (Tobbi) and Tanner are two Support community members we’d like to mention specifically for their continuing contributions throughout the project.

Tobias got started with Live Chat in January 2009, and since has become an active contributor to the Support knowledge base and the German localization community.  Earlier this month, he met up with dozens of other Mozilla project contributors at Mozcamp EU 2009 in Prague, and he has recently been working on creating add-ons for Firefox.  Tanner has been helping with the support project since starting with Live Chat in October, 2008. He has since become active in introducing new community members, in helping the Quality Assurance project by testing and investigating bugs, and in moderating our Support Forum. Tobbi and Tanner: thanks for being a great part of the Support community and the Mozilla project!

For people wanting to get more involved with Mozilla, helping with Live Chat is a great way to make a difference and connect with others. If a question isn’t documented on our Knowledge Base and the helper doesn’t know the answer, it’s easy to get advice from other people who are signed in. One of the best aspects of Live Chat is that you don’t need to be an expert to make a big difference, as it’s usually easy to find someone else who is already familiar with most any issue. All you need is 1-2 hours and a genuine willingness to help!

If you’re looking for a way to get more involved with other Mozilla volunteers, or if you enjoy helping others solve problems, we’d love to have you as part of the support community. You can join Live Chat directly, or see all the ways you can help Mozilla Support.

This past Thursday, we had a knowledge base sprint to write articles for the top Firefox crashes. It was a resounding success with 20 articles written on the day, covering the most common crashes experienced by Firefox users. Not only will this help Firefox users searching the knowledge base, this will also help contributors coming across an unfamiliar crash signature in the forums or live chat.

The main sprint wiki page links to all the articles that were written.

A special thanks goes to Jesse Ruderman, a Firefox developer, who took the whole day to work on this sprint, writing articles, analyzing bugs and helping pinpoint the causes of any crashes so we could give up-to-date suggestions in the knowledge base. We also had help from SUMO contributors and people from around the Mozilla project who read drafts and discussed crash reports.

Thank you!

During the Firefox 3.5 launch, the Mozilla Support community opened Live Chat extra hours to help people experiencing problems after the release. In all, we were able to answer over 1000 users with over 40 community members involved. Chatting with users right after a release lets us share feedback with the Quality Assurance and Launch teams, helping identify any new bugs that are affecting users. A number from the Mozilla Quality Assurance team were also available to assist with more difficult chats during launch week, and several were able to respond to chats when Live Chat was busy.

Overall, support during launch week was a huge success, and we’d like to thank everyone who helped make 3.5 the best Firefox release yet! Almost 50% fewer chat sessions were requested after Firefox 3.5 than after Firefox 3.0, which let us chat with over 90% of people requesting help. We were only able to chat with about half of users requesting help after Firefox 3.0, so this was a huge improvement! The top issues we saw following the release involved how to use new functionality in Firefox 3.5, add-on compatibility with 3.5, and a bug fixed in Firefox 3.5.1 that caused slow start-up times for some users. We regularly keep track of which issues are being seen often in Live Chat, and the full data for the 3.5 release is available in the SUMO Contributors Forum.

Since we have received positive feedback about the revised Live Chat schedule from the release, we have decided to keep some of the changes permanent. The changes have been announced in the Contributors Forum, and we would be glad to get more feedback about which times are best for the community. Since Live Chat requires users and helpers to be online at the same time, spreading out the times that Live Chat is open lets us reach as many people as possible.

Last Friday, SUMO came out with a brand new search engine. Previously, we’d been using Google to do searches of the knowledge base but this new search engine (based on Sphinx) allows us to get a better control over how the results are returned and ranked.

One other thing that this allows us to do is to return solved threads from the forum and article results from the knowledge base at the same time. While the knowledge base is still the primary resource, the forum also has a wealth of solutions and tips that can help Firefox users and this new search engine allows us to provide all this information from a single results page. We can also refine search results based on what terms are commonly searched and take advantage of tiki-wiki tags to make it even more useful.

This new search is still in its early stages so be sure to check it out and let us know what you think! A lot of thanks to everyone involved in coding, testing and deploying the new engine as well as fixing all the other bugs that went into SUMO 1.0.2.

Just over a month ago, we had our first open-format contributors meeting. It was wildly successful and we are actively taking your suggestions and ideas and using them to make SUMO better. Thus, you can imagine our excitement in announcing that the next contributors meeting will be in just over a week on March 9th 2009 at 10 AM PDT (don’t forget to turn your clocks forward in the US/Canada the day before!), 1 PM EDT, 5 PM GMT (those of you in the UK and Europe, you change your clocks a couple weeks later so the time difference looks off but it’s not, we promise!), 6 PM CET. The details of how to call in are at the bottom of this post (it’s free using Skype or toll free from the US).

In the meeting, we hope to cover the following topics:

• Followup on last meeting. One of the big suggestions from last meeting was to streamline communication. We’d like to know how we’re doing (now that we’ve increased our blogging frequency and added a twitter feed) and what we could be doing even better. Another suggestion was to make it easier for contributors to get started contributing, we’d like to get feedback from you on we’re doing with that as well.
• Firefox 3.1 KB roundup. Firefox 3.1 will soon be in beta 3 and release is coming up! The knowledge base has incorporated some changes and new articles in preparation for Firefox 3.1 and we want to make sure any questions that you have are cleared up as release day approaches.
• Support Firefox Day 5. With four Support Firefox Days under our belt, the next one is in the works! Currently scheduled for the end of March, the topic will be Firefox 3.1 support (there’s a blog post in the works). Of course, it wouldn’t be an event without input from our contributors … tell us what you’d like to see covered or how we can make the event fun and informative.
• Forum participation. As we work to encourage forum participation, we’re always interested in hearing how we can make the experience better for the contributors or get the word out more.

If there are more things you think we should cover in this or future meetings, just post to this Contributors forum thread!

We look forward to hearing from you on the 9th!

Meeting details:

Monday March 9th 10 AM PDT/1 PM EDT/5 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 call in to one of our weekly phone meetings Mondays at 10 AM PST/1 PM EST/6 PM GMT.

This month marks the one year anniversary of the launch of Live Chat as part of the SUMO project. During our first year, over 20,000 chat requests were answered by over 200 community members, ranging from new Firefox users to software developers. Live Chat is unique both in its ability to troubleshoot new issues quickly and provide a way for people to get interactive help with the instructions in the knowledge base. Live Chat contributors were able to help the Mozilla QA community quickly diagnose new issues after Firefox releases, as well as find parts of the SUMO knowledge base that needed to be updated. Congratulations and a huge thank you to all the community members who made our first year such a big success!

As we begin the new year, we are working to resolve some of the outstanding Live Chat bugs and on collecting data to see how well Live Chat is solving users’ issues. Last month, SUMO 0.8 introduced support for user satisfaction feedback at the end of each Live Chat session. The data from these surveys, along with all the other metrics from SUMO, is updated weekly on our Weekly Metrics page.

Of the 20% of users who answer the Live Chat survey, around 50% say that their problem was solved, and another 10% say they are planning to follow up after ending the chat session. Of the remaining 40% who respond that their problem was not solved, over 50% answer that the chat session ended before it was finished. Based on this feedback, we are focusing Live Chat development for the SUMO 0.8.2 and 0.9 releases on reducing disconnections and helping users follow up when they do lose their connection. To prevent situations in which too few contributors are available to answer the questions in the queue, we will be changing the queue behavior to automatically close when there are too many questions for the number of helpers.

Future development efforts will focus on improving the experience for helpers, primarily by transitioning to a web-based client for Live Chat contributors. We are looking for ideas on how to develop this web client and integrate it with SUMO – this will be discussed in an upcoming blog post, so stay tuned! If you can program in Java and want to contribute to the Live Chat project, feel free to submit a patch for any of the remaining unassigned bugs.

A last note of interest, Jammer400, who started helping with SUMO last July, had the privilege of answering the 20,000th live chat session in December. The 20,000th question was from a Firefox user who wanted an extension to access page zoom from the toolbar. Congratulations to Jammer400 for hitting this milestone, and to all the other contributors who helped us reach it! If Live Chat sounds like fun, we would love to have you be part of the project. You don’t need any special experience to get involved – see the Live Chat documentation for details on how to get started.

Everyone should head on over to the Support Firefox Day 3 homepage and get in on the action!

Support Firefox Day 3 is focusing on acquainting users with the awesome changes in Firefox 3 and even includes some tips for power users.  Sessions are LIVE and interactive.  Make sure you click “Turn me on” to enable the live video feed, and sign in to #sfd on irc.mozilla.org if you have a question (an client is available in the page if you don’t have your own.)

Schedule (all times GMT -7):

10:30 am PDT – Overview of Firefox 3’s new features with Director of Firefox Development Mike Connor

11:30 am PDT – How to use the Site Identification button and other new security features with Human Shield Johnathan Nightingale

12:30 pm PDT – Bookmarks, History, the Awesomebar and you! with Lead Places Developer Dietrich Ayala

1:15 pm PDT – Tricks for powerusers with Community Program Manager Seth Bindernagel

2:00 pm PDT – All about Firefox 3’s new web-based help with Firefox Support Manager David Tenser, hosted by Keeper of the Knowledge Base Chris Ilias

Followed by an open session:

Helping users with the Firefox Support community. We’ll show you how to get started helping users with problems and troubleshooting problems. Anyone can get started, you don’t have to be an expert!

See you there!

At the end of Sunday, June 15, we will close the Firefox Screencast Contest, so there are only a few days left for you to submit your screencast.

Want to win? Starting today, we will feature a number of daily Knowledge Base articles from the Screencast Contest that we want you to focus on. These articles either have no submissions or need more to get the best screencast possible. If you pick one of these articles, you definitely increase your chances of winning some prizes as the competition is currently low.

Today’s articles are:

• Configuring AVG Internet Security
• ActiveX (suggested section: Uninstalling the ActiveX plugin on Windows)
• Installing Firefox on Windows
• Basic Troubleshooting
• Firefox cache file was infected with a virus
• Unable to download or save files

I picked one of the articles above, Installing Firefox on Windows, and created a quick screencast for it using Jing. (If you’re new to Jing and screencasts, watch this easy tutorial from Jing’s website)

This is what the result looks like, after a couple of minutes recording the screencast: Watch how to install Firefox on Window

Think you can do better than that? We think so too! For one, it would be better if it included the part of the instructions covering downloading the installation file and save it to your desktop. Are you up for the challenge? The head over to the Firefox Screencast Contest and submit your screencast!

The weekend hasn’t started yet! Don’t miss the two remaining chat sessions on Support Firefox Day:

• 4:00 – 4:30 PM PDT: Chat with John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla Corporation. John will be available to answer your questions about Mozilla, including how it was started, where it’s going, and any other things you can think of.
• 4:30 – 5:00: Chat with Asa Dotzler, Spokesmodel and Storyteller. Asa has been a part of Mozilla since the very early days and is the perfect person to ask your questions — any questions — about… anything!

Head over to the Support Firefox Day Events page and follow the instructions there for how to ask questions to John and Asa.

…or “Share what you know, learn what you don’t.”

Tomorrow will be a special day for Mozilla as we’ll be hosting the very first Support Firefox Day. You’ll get a chance to learn more about Mozilla, Firefox 3, and Firefox Support (SUMO) — and have your voice heard. We promise you you’ll learn something new! We also hope you’ll be able to share that with others.

When?

• Friday May 23, starting 8 AM PDT

Where?

• Support Firefox Day start page

Here is the action-packed schedule:

• 8:00 AM PDT – 10:00: Support session #1
• 10:00 – 10:45: Workshop: Supporting Firefox 3 users with Live Chat. In this workshop, you’ll learn all you need to know about the cool user-to-user support solution on SUMO to start helping others. Host: Lucy Connor
• 11:00 – 11:30: Chat with Mike Connor, Developer Lead of Firefox 3. Mike will be taking your questions about the upcoming release of Firefox 3 and all its new features, including the all-new product help (yes, SUMO!)
• 11:30 – 12:30: Support Session #2
• 12:30 – 1:15: Workshop: Learn all about the new bookmark system in Firefox 3 (tags, smart location bar, keywords) to better help others. Host: Dietrich Ayala
• 1:30 – 2:00: Chat with Mike Beltzner, Phenomenologist & Usability Design Expert. This is your chance to get your questions about the Mozilla way of designing software answered straight from the source. You’ll learn, among other things, how user feedback and support continuously loops back into product.
• 2:00 – 3:00: Support Session #3
• 3:00 – 3:45: Workshop: Learn how to troubleshoot Firefox 3 like a pro. You’ll find out more about how Firefox works, and at the same time you’ll become an expert of user-to-user troubleshooting. Host: Matthew Middleton
• 4:00 – 4:30: Chat with John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla Corporation. John will be available to answer your questions about Mozilla, including how it was started, where it’s going, and any other things you can think of.
• 4:30 – 5:00: Chat with Asa Dotzler, Spokesmodel and Storyteller. Asa has been a part of Mozilla since the very early days and is the perfect person to ask your questions — any questions — about… anything!

The big highlight of the day will be the best new Firefox 3 feature of all: Firefox’s new user-based support system. All throughout the day, we’ll be showcasing the various aspects to the support system: from the collaboratively written knowledge base to the forums and chat-based support, and we’re inviting you to take part. We’ll be around all day in #sumo to answer questions and help you get started helping your fellow users and Firefox enthusiasts.

Please let us know if you’re coming so we can better plan the events. See you tomorrow!