• Article: How to customize the toolbar
• Screencast: Click to view

His video won because it best satisfied the four judging criteria.  For one, Cameron showed how to customize the toolbar, which is not the easiest concept to communicate or digest.  For many users, it’s a new concept to change around the position of the buttons that sit in the browser.  With his great video, Cameron really demystified how challenging this could have been for an end user.  The production quality met our standards with great timing and flow (not too fast, not too slow) and everything fitting well in the screencast.  Of course, we would not have chosen him if his video had not covered the concepts completely.  Finally, his screencast really matched the information in the article.  Users who read this article and view his screencast will have a very detailed explanation with an illustration of just how to rearrange the buttons on the toolbar.

This is exactly the type of screencast we were looking for - a visual medium to help translate and communicate technical concepts to a wider audience. Overall, a terrific effort by Cameron.  Nice work!!

The other winning screencasts will be announced soon…

Sumo

• Cww is in MV this week! Sitting in the conf room with djst.
• Proposed goals for Q3:
  • Establish formal feedback loop to QA/dev about user’s most common Firefox problems
  • Develop performance & customer satisfaction metrics to determine our quality of support
  • Get better understanding of how people are using SUMO to further improve the site — are people searching? what do they search for? what’s the usage ratio of the KB vs user-to-user support offerings?
  • Make the support forum helpful and easy to use for both contributors and users (SUMO 0.7 milestone)
  • Plan, design, and develop improved search engine to replace the one currently used in SUMO
• New milestone scheme — instead of major 0.x milestones and ad hoc production server pushes, we’re switching to minor 0.0.x milestones on a bi-weekly basis
  • This gives us and IT better control, and allows for more structured scheduling
  • The overall 0.x milestones will still be kept, but they will be fixed incrementally. E.g. 0.7 will be preceded by 0.6.1, 0.6.2, etc.

Knowledge Base

• Survey results and analysis are posted in mozilla.support.planning [1]. Lots of good feedback that we should digest, e.g.:
  • UI of article editor confusing — djst has been in contact with Alain Désilets of TikiWiki about what things need improvement in terms of usability. Should definitely share this feedback with Alain.
  • cilias to provide a condensed list of UI/l10n specific feedback and report to djst
• Bugzilla: 4 new article requests [2], 1 article bug fixed [3].

Forums

• Similar traffic as last week. No stats this week.
• np still has some access problems in getting to use the db dumbs for stats analysis. Will comment in bug report about it.
• One of our biggest problems today is that most users post anonymously, and we have little knowledge of how many of those users actually find their way back to the thread they posted when someone responds to it. This is something we will fix with the 0.7 milestone by sending out an e-mail notification to the original poster whenever someone responds to a thread. The OP should then be able to either:
  • Select “Yes, this response solved my problem,” which would mark the thread as solved, or
  • Select “No, this response did not solve my problem,” which would take the user back to the thread so he/she can provide more info
• This will likely dramatically increase the number of users getting their problems solved, and it will also allow us to confirm that we’re doing a good job (customer satisfaction metrics).

Live Chat

• Cww, zzxc, and cilias can all help with covering the shifts for this week. np can’t really help out because of his full-time job that conflicts with the hours of operation.
• cilias has some good feedback about the Live Chat process since he views it from a different perspective than the people who have already used it. Will provide feedback and share with team.
• More generally, getting feedback from new contributors is something we should focus more on. Actively ask contributors if there are things they find confusing, and pay attention to what questions we receive from contributors/localizers.

We are thrilled to post them so our end users can begin to use this new content. And, we are excited to announce our winners!

For his work with How to customize the toolbar (note: that’s the Knowledge Base article; we’re still working on making the resulting screencast public!), the judges chose Cameron Roy.  Cameron submitted several stellar videos, many of which will be featured in the KB.  This video was high quality and complete — Cameron took a tricky topic, thought of a creative example to illustrate it, and did a great job filming the video!

If you submitted a video that was ranked best among the submissions for a particular article, you will be contacted shortly about your prize: a SUMO screencast t-shirt!

Thanks again, everyone.  Your work will have a lasting impact on Firefox’s 180+ million users who might need a little extra support.  Congrats!

Sumo

• New theme went live last week — please file bugs if you see any problems (but please search first, as there have been a lot of them filed already!) :)
• 0.6 release this week — Wednesday or Thursday during a downtime window is the plan
• New weekly dev meeting every Tuesday at 9 AM PDT, where we’ll focus on bug triaging, assigning, and milestone planning.
• Weekly metrics
  • Second most searched term is “clear history” — pretty high chance this is about the AwesomeBar. Suggest adding links about it from the Clearing Location Bar results article to make sure people are aware of what they’re seeing

Knowledge Base

• Launch week was the most active week in the KB ever, including both new articles written and number of article edits and contributors
• Bugzilla:
  • Week of Firefox 3: 11 article requests [1], 17 article bugs fixed [2]
  • Last week: 3 article requests [3][4][5], 4 article bugs fixed [6]
• Hoping to unlock in-product articles this week so people can keep improving them. They were locked during l10n string freeze to minimize the workload for localizers, but now it’s time to open it up again.

Forums

• Got stats for the past couple weeks - 5000 threads last week, 3500 this week
• Many new contributors, though some are probably one time users.
• New really helpful contributor: alterna! Over 100 posts already. Welcome alterna! :)

Live Chat

• Still getting a fair number of new accounts post-release
• Several approvals since release
  • maniac, mzz, phreakyphotographer, wolfwindshadow, silentme
  • more should be ready this week
• New hours while Cww is away
• Need to start looking at moving to the open source plug-ins [7]
• Follow-up on pref to add more admin accounts
  • djst to bring this up in tomorrow’s sumo dev meeting
• zzxc (Matthew) and mzz are working on adding Fastpath support to gajim
  • zzxc to document what’s needed from IT and what the plan and progress is
• Lucy be away and unreachable July 9th - 20th - Do we close or can others cover?
  • cilias and np might be able to cover a few shifts. Lucy to send out e-mail with planned hours of operation so we can figure it out.

Sumo

• Weekly metrics
  • Significantly increased traffic from Firefox 3, as expected
  • Servers held up generally well (at least not worse than any other service!)
  • Traffic has dropped steadily since launch day, but will definitely increase rapidly again as we start rolling out the automatic updates
  • New calculation of top polls. Previous results were only using the top 30 polls. New results use any en-US articles with over 20 results
  • Can’t load action log screen to get stats
• Firefox 3
  • Generally the approach to escalate common security issues regarding Firefox 3 worked well. See also separate blog post about that.
  • Jason: working on getting stats on most common issues. Tiki not being co-operative.
  • Possible stats:
    • Most visited articles (Urchin)
    • Most voted on articles (Tiki)
    • Most helpful articles, based on number of votes (Tiki)
    • Articles/external URLs linked to most often in forums (Tiki)
• SFD3 feedback
  • The general approach of using a single page hosting both IRC channel for chat, and Mogulus for all workshops worked really well
  • A lot less confusion about where events were hosted, and a lot less work on updating IRC status messages, wiki pages with schedules, etc.
  • Mogulus also gave us the ability to see how many people were participating (up to 45 people!), and people could be logging in before an event started
  • Thanks to Cww for figuring out how Mogulus and desktop sharing worked in Windows, and to Dietrich for doing the same on the Mac!
  • Figuring out the exact time requirements for the individual events can be tricky — should figure out what we can fill the channel with when there’s no live content going
  • In summary, we got around 6-10 more live chat contributors and a few more forum contributors
• Status of Google SoC projects
  • The screenshot annotation project is going really well, with most requirements already fully defined and a student working very hard to always stay ahead of me (djst, the mentor). :)
  • The Search project hasn’t really started yet because the student has been busy with exams, but we have figured out a reasonable scope and will have a meeting with the student this Wednesday. He has pretty solid approaches on the problems so things look promising. nkoth is the mentor.

Knowledge Base

• cilias couldn’t make it to today’s meeting, but we covered the important bits above (important issues with Firefox 3 were looped back into the KB and promoted to the start page)

Forums

• Big thanks to all those who helped in the forum. There were a lot of questions posted, but we got through it well.
• Bo and cor-el now over 10,000 posts!! A huge thanks to these amazing guys.
• Some intermittent bugs with the forum - pages showing up with a different stylesheet, new posts not reflected immediately, can’t delete posts…

Live Chat

• In a normal week, about 300 live chat requests are answered. Last week over 1000 were answered!! Really incredible effort by the community.
• 46 new accounts
• Updated server software to 3.5.2 last night
• Time to start hacking group — people from the Live Chat community are interested in coding. Lucy and djst to approach Jive devs for a good peer reviewer to get us started.
• Lucy to post requirements doc for scheduling software ideas on the wiki

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!

What an amazing launch we’ve had so far! At the time I’m writing this, over 6.5 million people have downloaded Firefox 3, and from a Firefox Support perspective it shows. The majority of the support questions we’ve received the last 20 hours have been about Firefox 3.

This launch was an intensive stress test of our new support system. With any software release, issues can quickly become very frequently reported and need to be escalated. We were on full alert, and had previously setup specific rules for how to handle cases when issues are surfaced. Whenever a major issue was reported multiple times in a high frequency, we would file a “critical” priority bug to get the solution to the problem documented in the Knowledge Base and then seed it into the top 10 article list of the front page.

We had to do that a couple of times yesterday (Firefox 3 upgrade reverts bookmarks and other settings to older version and Firefox 3 will not start on Mac OS X 10.3.9). This is just the beginning, though, and we are continuing our mission for improved support. Jason is working on a list of the most common issues reported so we can hand that over to the development and QA teams. We would also like to figure out exactly how much promoting a common issue to the front page helps us. The relevant data here seems to be the ratio between a specific problem vs other problems, and how that data changes when we promote it to the front page. This is just one of the metrics we would like to have in order to continuously improve SUMO.

With the powerful group of helpful people who teamed up around the SUMO project, we were able to help countless of new users. And we definitely had lots of fun while doing it! Yesterday, I was helping around 15 users using Live Chat. In some of these chat sessions, trainees (hi Koko and Frankieo!) were watching while I was helping the user, in order to give them a taste of how the Live Chat experience is like. After some sessions, we also tried the other way around (me watching/mentoring while the trainees were interacting with the users). All in all, it was a very fun, collaborative, but also challenging experience, and we all learned from it. I hope to see the new trainees again today, and tomorrow!

I’d like to take the opportunity to thank all the loyal and incredibly helpful contributors of the SUMO project, and welcome all the new ones. Without your hard work and dedication to Mozilla, we wouldn’t be able to be as responsive to our users as we were. Thank you!

Wow, we’re up at 7 million downloads now! That’s 500,000 new downloads while I was writing this post. Either I’m an extremely slow writer, or people really like Firefox.

Even if you only have a few minutes to spare, your effort can help one, two, three, or ten new users.

Super Easy

• Monitor the support forum for unanswered questions — Just browse through the list of questions and see if there is anything you know the answer to. You don’t even have to have an account, although I recommend you get one anyway to show who you are.
• Hang out in #livechat on irc.mozilla.org — Other Live Chat helpers may find you there and ping you to help them out in case they run into a hard question. You don’t have to participate in helping users directly, just answering questions other Live Chat helpers might have.

Relatively Easy

• Help users directly in Live Chat — Actually it’s not that hard, but it’s definitely more time consuming than the other ways of helping out. Read all about how to get started — it only takes 5 minutes! Seth Bindernagel’s blog post on why you should try Live Chat out is definitely worth a read too.

Thanks for considering helping us today! If you have any questions about how you can help out, don’t hesitate to contact us. Find out more on the How to contribute page on support.mozilla.com.

Localizers: it would mean the world to us if you could spend a few minutes to make sure the links to your localized product help work properly. Use the link in the Help menu, and open the Options/Preferences window and click Help from there.

Chris and I wrote a document summarizing all that should be done: Updating product help for your locale. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. Don’t forget to localize the start pages if you haven’t done it already! It’s really easy and only takes five minutes.

Thanks!

Attention SUMO contributors: If you haven’t submitted a screencast for one of our top 100 knowledge base articles yet, today is the perfect day. As you might know, we have been running a contest where we reward one winner per article (up to 100 winners!) with a prize, and the best screencast overall with a grand prize. There are still plenty of chances to win, but you have to submit your screencast before 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time today!

Participating really couldn’t be easier — just pick one of the top 100 knowledge base articles and follow the instructions while recording it with e.g. Jing.

1. Pick an article from the top 100 list
2. Create a screencast for the article
3. Submit your screencast

If you’re one of the 100 winners, your screencast will be used in a Knowledge Base article read by thousands and thousands of Firefox users. Not only will you be rewarded with a prize, you will really make a difference to provide invaluable help for all those users.

Happy filming!