SUMO in 2013: Firefox Android

This is part 4 of SUMO in 2013, and the focus today is Firefox on Android!

Our goals for Firefox for Android support can be summarized in three words: Community, Mobilization, and Community! :)

Enable fully community-driven self-service support for Firefox for Android

The scope of SUMO has grown significantly in the last year. We went from supporting just one product (Firefox on the desktop) to multiple products, and this suddenly made the SUMO community feel small — despite being several hundred people strong!

In 2013, we will focus even harder on scale in order to keep up with all the support documentation needed for all of our products. With Firefox for Android, we want to enable a model where the ownership of the knowledge base is with the wider community. In practical terms, this means that the responsibility of keeping articles up to date and writing new ones would be shared by a wider group of people in our community.

Android is the most widely used mobile operating system today, and Firefox on this OS has made incredible improvements in the last year and is now easily the best web browser in the ecosystem. A big part of this has been our tireless work on helping our users on SUMO while listening carefully to what they’re telling us about their experience in places like our forum and in Google Play reviews.

Contributing to SUMO is a great way to get involved in this effort and help shape the future of Firefox on Android. Here are some ways you can dig in right now:

Develop mobile support web app with built-in social support

busstop

Bus Stop No. 75 by mgarbowski. (CC)

Imagine someone standing at a bus stop waiting for the bus to arrive in the morning. While she’s standing there, she pulls up her phone and launches the SUMO app where she finds a user who has a problem with Firefox for Android. She quickly pulls down a canned response, customizes the answer a bit and hits Send. Right there, as she was waiting for the bus, she was able to help a fellow Firefox user solve their problem. A few minutes later, karma kicks in: she gets a notification in her phone that the user found her answer helpful…. and the bus suddenly arrives!

In 2013 we want to enable mobile contributions like this — and this will of course also be useful to help users of all of our other products, including Firefox OS! We’re already well on our way with our work last year on mobilizing the SUMO website, but there are some more steps to take to “appify” it too — things like hooking into the mobile notification system.

This summarizes the key goals we are working on this year around Firefox for Android. Stay tuned for the final part of this blog series.

If you’re interested in getting involved and learning more about what we’re working on to make the web better, please join our discussions in our SUMO contributor discussions forum. Oh, and don’t forget that today is SUMO day. Help us answer questions in the support forum and join us in irc.mozilla.org channel #sumo!