Over the past two and a half months I have worked on a variety of metrics-related projects for Mozilla. I have done analytics work for the Metrics, Localization (L10n), Firefox, Marketing, and Add-ons teams (and probably a few I can’t think of right now). Basically, as the Web Analytics Intern I’ve worked on two or three major projects, and then I’ve supplied any analysis teams would like done for decisions they were trying to make on a variety of topics.
One of the main projects that I have worked on deals with the Broken Website Reporter tool in Firefox (seen by choosing Help->Report Broken Web Site). I spent a few weeks taking the SQL file of everyone that has reported a broken website over the past three years (about 1.5 million observations), querying it, and writing simple python scripts to analyze the data by problem type, geographic location, etc. One of the hurdles of this analysis was the fact that I knew absolutely no MySQL or Python before my internship, but thankfully everyone at Mozilla was extremely supportive and helpful with any problems I encountered.
Another project I wrapped up towards the end of the internship was breaking down our support.mozilla.com (SUMO) traffic. I actually started this project towards the beginning of the summer, but ran into some slow downs when we had to implement custom pathing solutions within our analytics tools. For much of the project I worked with our IT department (which did most of the legwork, thankfully). I ended up with the ability to analyze paths SUMO visitors take after searching for different terms in our Knowledge Base. In this way we can find where users aren’t receiving the help they come to us for, and learn how to better serve our community by changing our support site. You can view my findings in my blog post about the subject.
Aside from these two projects I worked on more minor stats-related tasks (although equally as fun for me) like forecasting our average daily usage and market share.
This summer at Mozilla was hands down the best job I’ve had. Not only do you get to eat free food, play ping pong, and dress however you want, but you are working on projects that actually make a difference in millions of people’s browsing experience. The great addition to working on the Metrics team is that (unlike a lot of companies) Mozilla is VERY open with their data. I got to write blog posts about the data I was playing with and gather feedback from the community on ideas to improve my studies or new ways to examine our data. This was a breath of fresh air and, as an advocate of pushing as much safe data public as possible, a truly unique experience.
