The Firefox Clinic was an absolute blast!

Last month the support team put together the pilot Firefox Clinic event. We had 51 Firefox users come into the San Francisco space, many with computers in tow, to get in-person help. Check out this short video of the day by Spencer Hui:

Planet Mozilla viewers – you can watch this video on YouTube.

Dan Callahan (brand new Mozilla employee, Identity team) said:

It was an amazing opportunity to actually see how our product serves its users. I feel far more connected to our community, and I have a much greater understanding of not just the “what” of our work, but also the “why.”

As someone who works with Firefox users and community every day, I have to agree with Dan. It’s quite a different thing to work with people in person. It’s immensely rewarding and we were all excited and exhausted at the end of the day.

We had a really wide range of people show up. From web developers that use Firefox every day to people new to computers who’d never used Firefox before. And though we asked people to come to us to get help fixing problems, the thing we saw that everyone had in common was how interested they all were in just learning more about the Internet, Firefox and Mozilla. Here’s another short video with excepts of the video Spencer shot of people explaining what they came to get help with.

Planet Mozilla viewers – you can watch this video on YouTube.

We learned a lot from this event and we’ll be putting together some tools for people to do this on their own or with a small group. But we’d also like to do this again in a Mozilla space. Maybe next time we’ll try doing it during the week so that it’s easier for more teams to be involved. As it was we had people from a number of teams participate.

Here’s what Zhenshuo Fang (Firefox UX designer) had to say:

The Firefox Clinic event provides a great opportunity for designers to communicate with our users, to understand their happiness and pain, and to build empathy. During the event, I interviewed 11 users who have different gender, age and technical level. They shared with me how they use Firefox on different devices, how they customize their Firefox and some of the issues they have when using Firefox. I was also able to show some new features that I’m working on. All users are really exited to try out the new designs and give their feedback. Just by observing how users interact with the prototype, I gained many insights on the interaction flaws and how we can improve on the current design.

I highly recommend designers in our team attend Firefox Clinic events. Actually, everyone in Firefox team, not just designers, should take advantage to talk to users, build empathy, and together build a better user experience for Firefox.

And we had this from Cori Schauer (User Research):

If you do this event again, I think the User Research team should have a researcher paired up with a troubleshooter, and listen to all the issues that are coming in. That allows us to understand what people are having problems with, as well as the opportunity to ask follow up questions.

I really think events like this personify the Firefox brand and Mozilla’s mission. Our users left happy and community members left inspired. Maybe one day we can do it in lots of cities at once, all over the world.

And once again, I’d like to thank Dylan Verdi, James Ouyang, Zhenshuo Fang, Tim Watts, Crystal Beasley, Matthew Claypotch, Amy Tsay, Cori Schauer, Dan Callahan and Spencer Hui for spending their Saturday making this a success.