Category Archives: General

Firefox OS English User Guide

Today we begin a week-long celebration of our awesome Firefox OS Knowledge Base contributor community. So, I baked some brownies for all of you who contributed to any of the 16 help article sprints I’ve been hosting since last October in preparation for shipping the first Firefox OS devices. The result is a splendid Firefox OS User Guide.

brownies that say Congratulations! SUMO Firfox OS KB

As a salute to finalizing these articles for L10n, I went ahead and left in the typo! :) If only all of my typos were made of cream cheese frosting…

We started this project from nothing in October, just an outline (ok, a very large outline) of the scope of articles we should write. Today we have 50 clear, beautiful, helpful English knowledge base articles that were a collaboration between 24 KB editors and reviewers:

  • satdav
  • feer56
  • rtanglao
  • zombie
  • espressive
  • tjovanovic
  • iNerd
  • ariestiyansyah
  • yalam96
  • pychen
  • hermina_condei
  • willyaranda
  • adampeebleswrites
  • Tonnes
  • Swarnava
  • Scoobidiver
  • rnewman
  • mandel
  • bram
  • Tylerdowner
  • verdi
  • Ibai
  • KadirTopal

Congratulations and thank you to everyone who has made the Firefox OS KB project a success!! This hard work is the content of the Mozilla’s Firefox OS support pages, it is the in-product Help for Firefox OS in the Settings, it is already regarded as an excellent resource by our OEM partners and our carrier partners. Please please take a moment to just absorb that and the impact your contribution will have on Firefox OS users and the Mozilla mission. It is big. You are The Best. Thank you.

One awesomely designed support center and what makes it rock

Cross-posted from djst.org:

Inspired by Desk.com’s article titled 12 Awesomely Designed Support Centers and What Makes Them Rock, I decided to take the opportunity to demonstrate why our very own help center, support.mozilla.org (SUMO) is way better than all of their twelve help centers combined. ;)

Although their article reads more as a showcase of some of the companies that happened to choose them as their support service provider (which we would never do, since our site is powered by our very own, superior and open-sourced CMS Kitsune), it’s still interesting to look at what they view as great design decisions in a help center to see how we compare.

Here are the main themes of their feedback that I distilled:

1. “The site looks great on all devices from mobile to desktop … The layout of the site is clean and makes it easy to navigate on any device”

We’re mighty proud of the mobile-optimized view of SUMO. It’s one of the most beautifully designed mozilla.org web properties ever made and it works across all mobile platforms. Bram did a fantastic job with the design, and it will fit our future Firefox OS support site like a glove:

You can try this out right away by navigating to support.mozilla.org with your Android or iPhone device. And if you’re one of the lucky few with a Firefox OS testing device, our site obviously works just as well there. :)

2. “The uncluttered design and iconography makes it easy to find information … The iconography makes topics easy to identify and stand out”

Our design uses beautiful icons to organize the content into help topics based on what users most commonly look for on our website. We tested this with paper prototyping before implementing it to make sure that the taxonomy and overall design was ideal for our unique product portfolio.

Our help topics area has beautiful icons

3. “The ability to view support center by topics or by articles is a great way to organize content … The organization of content makes it simple to find the exact answers you need”

We really went the extra mile on this one. In our user studies, we noticed that users have different behaviors when it comes to navigating to the answer to their question. Some people want to start by picking a general topic, while others prefer to pick the product they want support for first. As a result, we made sure that both of these orders work just as well on SUMO.

products and services

You can pick a topic and a product, and then we’ll show you a list of articles that matches that query. From that point, you can even filter that list down even further with the Refine and Focus feature, which allows you to pick from a more granular list of topics:

Our Refine and Focus lets you pick exactly the topic you need help with.

4. “The design is simple, clean and easy to navigate … The colors and typography are solid, strong and consistent with branding … The design is simple and clean and doesn’t distract from the important content”

The look and feel of SUMO is consistent with the overall design language of mozilla.org. This was a specific design requirement since support is an extension of the product experience. Also notice the language selector on the right — our site is available in multiple languages, and the localization is done by our amazing community of SUMO volunteers: people like our new Spanish locale leader Avelper, or my great friends and veteran Italian localizers Michele Rodaro and Underpass.

The typography and navigation elements are consistent throughout our web properties.

5. “The support center articles are well written and easy to understand”

We took great care to make sure that our articles are engaging, easy to understand and that they have a friendly tone. We also really considered the target audience and even the mood that they might be in when visiting our site (e.g. frustrated because they’re trying to figure out a solution to a problem). Great support is an important extension of the Firefox brand and the values that Mozilla stands for, so it’s important that we get this right. Our awesome content manager Michael played a huge role in making this a reality. Here are some of the support articles that capture these aspects well:

6. “There’s a ton of helpful information from community questions to how-to videos”

Videos are very powerful because they can convey lots of information very quickly and demonstrate features in ways that no texts or screenshots can ever come close to. It’s a bit like the difference between reading an article about how to play barre chords and just watching someone do it.

A video showing how to restore your previous Firefox session.

So there you have it! I love reading articles like the one on Desk.com because they make me realize just how far we’ve come at Mozilla with SUMO. Our support site is the result of lots of hard work by several teams, including of course the SUMO team, the SUMO dev team, and the UX team. And this year we’ll get even better — I’ll blog more about our plans for 2013 soon.

SUMO now helping an additional 7.3 million visitors

About 3 weeks ago we made the switch to a new information architecture and new design. The goal was to improve the browsability of the site and help people find the articles that they were looking for. 3 Weeks later we can now take a look at our key performance indicators to determine whether the whole project was worth the effort

Methodology

Since this project was primarily concerned with the Knowledge Base, we can focus on the helpfulness rating in this channel. Also, we know from our exit surveys that about 80% of our visitors use the KB.  The KB helpfulness rating is based on the survey that accompanies each article in each language. We ask the question “Was this article helpful?”, which can be answered with yes or no. Of course this metric is not perfect, articles that describe features have higher ratings than articles explaining how to fix a problem, English articles are generally higher rated than localized articles, despite having the same content, and the rating is also influenced by the path people took to get to the page. However, in this case we are not interested in the absolute ratings, we are particularly interested in the change since we moved to the new iA and design.

So, what happened?

We knew from previous tests that making the site browsable would be beneficial for that segment of our users who would rather browse than search for their article. People rate an article down, when it’s not the one that they were looking for. We know so much from our article surveys, and assuming we did our homework we should help more people find the right article. That being the case we expected the helpfulness of articles to rise, but it was hard to tell by how much it would rise. Considering that we have over 500,000 visitors per day and 80% use the KB, even a change by one percentage point would help an additional 1.46 million visitors per year. Without further ado, here are the results:

The results are phenomenal, we raised the helpfulness by 10 percent on average. That’s an increase by 5 percentage points and means an additional 7.3 million visitors per year stating that they found a SUMO article helpful. This is across all languages and across all incoming channels. It means that in 7.3 million cases where people might have decided to drop Firefox or be miserable because they couldn’t get Firefox to do what they wanted, they will now leave SUMO satisfied with their browser.

It’s hard to overstate the significance of this, and we are extremely happy with the results. The improvements to the site were the result of month of hard work by many people on the SUMO team, from SUMOdev, our creative team, and UX designers. We knew we were able to offer our users a better service, and the work has finally paid off. Continually thinking about how to serve our users better is what’s driving this team, and we will take these results as motivation to work even harder on improving our services.

Today, I’m very proud of what this team made possible, and I’d like to extend my thanks to each and everyone involved in the process: You made these results possible!

The all new SUMO

Today we are going to make one of the biggest changes yet to SUMO, the Mozilla Support site, and this blog post is about what changes we are making. The changes will effect you the most as a user, but there are a number of changes for contributors as well.

First, a little history, what’s the SUMO team been up to this year?

For the last 9 month the SUMO team has been working on a new way to let users access our site content. Until recently the only way to reach most of our articles was by search, or by following links in articles. This is how wikis traditionally work. Of course that way of accessing content only works for a part of our visitors, some people want to search and some people want to browse to the solution, drilling down with ever finer topics to reduce the number of article that are related to the issue.

To come up with a new information architecture that would let people drill down like that, we first researched the mental model of our site users, how they think about issues and in what categories they would look for them. Based on that we created a small number of base categories and assigned our articles to those categories.

The next step was figuring out how to make this information architecture visible. We started to lay out a number of alternatives on paper and tested with real people in a lab. This paper prototyping gave us a way to test a number of ways to lay out the information very quickly. After a number of iterations we settled on the final designs and workflows.

Now we had everything to start adapting our site, but since this would be a big redesign, and we’d soon switch to the new unified One Mozilla design anyway, the decision was made to use this opportunity to rebuild the site based on the new theme, and that’s why the changes today not only affect the KB, but every part of our site.

So, what is changing? What does it look like?

The main change is, that we now support several products from one start page and all articles can be accessed by browsing. Let’s start with the start page:

We have the main topics on top, they allow you to start browsing by selecting your issue first, and then the product you have issue with.

One step below you can see the hot topics. Those are actually articles, things that came up recently and affect a large number of people. By providing them upfront we save a large number of people the hassle of searching or browsing for their solution.

Below that we have the product picker, this is a way to navigate our content by choosing the product first and then narrowing down the topics.

No matter what way you select, topic first or product first, you’ll end up narrowing down the number of articles to a scanable few and proceed to read one of the articles.

The important thing for localizers to note is: all of this is automated, there is no need anymore to create navigation pages and all the confusion that brought with it.

So, how did the article view change? On the surface not much has changed, but because we keep track of topics, we can now offer you a way to move to related topics, which is particularly interesting for people landing on articles from external searches:

Much, much more has changed, but this is the gist for the KB part of the site.

So, what has changed for forum contributors?

While the new iA did not touch the support forum per se, we took the redesign as an opportunity to improve a number of factors in the listing of questions for our contributors.

The new design is more friendly and clean, but at the same time gives more information about the thread content at the same time. This is especially helpful when contributors scan the thread listing page deciding which thread to pick next.

We already started rolling the design out to our contributor base over the last week and will start rolling it out to 1% of the general audience today. If everything goes to plan we’ll make it available to the general audience on Monday. If you want to try it out now, just register an account, and if you have any feedback, please use the comment section below.

The new information architecture will open up our content to a whole new group of users and make it much more accessible, while our new design is more coherent, taking into account all of the features we added since our first release while also being consistent with the Mozilla sites in general. All of this makes us very excited and hopeful that we’ll get that much closer to our number one goal: Happy users!

MozCamp EU 2012 trip report

Mobilize Mozilla! was the theme for this Mozcamp in Warsaw, Poland September 7-9. So, it was all about mobile, while remembering that Desktop is where we have all the users and where our market share is ever-growing. Warsaw at night

Opening night and Buddy program

We had a nice welcome on Friday night where everyone found their “buddy”. We were all paired with a buddy and we have a mission that we will work on through October.

My buddy is Robert Kaiser of Vienna, he works on stability for desktop Firefox, so we spent lots of time talking about how to get things like crash reporting into Firefox OS. He’s the original SeaMonkey lead and he’s in a ton of conversations everywhere, so I was very glad to get to work with him.

Keynotes

The keynote from Mitchell was great, as usual, and she made strong points about building great products and our values. But, she also said we need to be ready to launch things that are imperfect and that even today Firefox is not the perfect reflection of our values and so we need to plow ahead with our values in mind, but not with perfection as our goal.

Tristan’s keynote talked all about the new spaces in Europe and how well it is going there. And we got to sit with him at dinner Saturday night and he told us more about the amazing Paris office.

Jay Sullivan’s keynote was a combination of product presentation bullet points and demos. He had a Telefonica big-wig demo the Firefox OS phone and talk about their excitement and partner excitement. Wes Johnston demoed the new Firefox for Android and reader mode, touch events, and marketplace.

David Slater, the new Marketing/Engagement leader at Mozilla, gave a keynote that was really funny and great to watch. He is poised on stage and made a lot of good jokes about marketing and graphs and T-shirts. His whole message was that he wants to fund small marketing initiatives all over the world and he wants anyone with an idea, no matter how crazy, to tell Gen Kenai and they will consider funding it if its good.

Mark Surman, was the most inspirational keynote. He talked all about education and the web and putting a “Hack Me” button on everything. He talked about how we live in a digital world and increasingly, it will be important for people to understand the structure of that world to thrive.

Finally, the Community Quilt keynote, where 33 language communities presented their accomplishments and goals and challenges to the audience in succession. This quilt keynote is my favorite presentation at Mozcamp. It always makes me feel that I can do so much more and that I should have bigger goals and that I want to make Mozillians proud and support them fully because they are so passionate and compassionate and driven. Many of the communities around the world said that for 2013 they were preparing to support or localize Firefox OS. So, I feel that I am part of a truly global effort to bring this smartphone to market and I welcome all of you to join us in our mission!

Firefox OS demos & desktop build install fest

There was a program for 20 people to have prototype Firefox OS phones to demo throughout the weekend. So, I demoed my Firefox OS phone along with them. I completed 12 demos during the weekend, which seems like none, but I felt like I was constantly showing it around. People really liked the interaction model and the overall experience. We had a great time sharing thoughts about the device, collecting initial feedback and found that everyone is very enthusiastic about the progress of the future product!

The best part of my demo-fest was talking to people about the infinite possibilities presented by Firefox OS for people to hack on mobile and customize their experience and build apps and be part of the ecosystem. We spent hours talking about how it fits in with everything from civilian participation to bio-gardening. Mozillians are truly awesome, let no one tell you otherwise.

Me and Ibai Garcia led a workshop on installing the desktop build of Firefox OS that was very well-attended. thanks to Roland Tanglao for leading the Windows installs! Alex Kebyl gave a similar talk the previous day and also referred to verdi’s How To article describing setup of the desktop builds of Firefox OS and our workshop. We got at least five people up and running and felt that the rest of the attendees at our workshop would certainly get it running. So, it was a real success for us and Firefox OS. Here is a great picture of me and some awesome workshop attendees: Firefox OS desktop builds workshop

The ultimate goal of running the desktop builds is to document the features of Firefox OS in the following Knowledge base articles for future users of the product and to learn how it works in preparation for answering questions on the forum. The Mozilla Support knowledge base is a wiki that anyone can contribute to, so feel free to join in!

We will start with English articles, then localize to Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish toward the end of the calendar year. We have created Firefox OS discussion forums where we can talk about how we will support future users and you can ask any questions you have about the documentation wiki. We are just getting started, so I welcome your participation.

Vivien, a lead developer on the Firefox OS attended our workshop and I heard lot of talk afterward that they would simplify the steps to make setup of the desktop builds easier and I think I already saw something come across the wires about bundling the profile into the build somehow. So, showing people trying to do it had its own impact. We gave out Firefox Clinic T-shirts and Firefox stickers to everyone and told them it was a contract that required that they help users on SUMO. So, we’ve seen some new contributions come across this week as a result. Thanks to all of you who attended and have contacted me or contributed to SUMO since I met you! You and your spirit of collaboration are what makes Mozilla great!

Firefox for Android feedback presentation

My other workshop was for Firefox for Android non-English feedback. A big group of SUMO contributors were there and I talked about the manual feedback collection we currently do for English Google Play reviews. Wes Johnston of the mobile-dev team attended and said how super-helpful it is to get user feedback summaries in mobile engineering each week and how it changes and often guides their priorities.

I asked that contributors read reviews of Firefox in their native language and consider providing a simple list of the top three problems that show up in their language for the mobile engineering team as a great way to contribute to the project if you are just getting started in your locale. You don’t need to be technically savvy or use any special tools, you just need to read the Google Play reviews and send a list of the top three problems that users comment on to me, mluna, each week on Tuesdays. We will then report it to engineering, so they can prioritize issues that appear in non-English locales. You can also just add it to the mobile engineering weekly meeting roundtable section on wiki.mozilla.org.

SUMO development in 2012

We are more than halfway through 2012 and this seems like a good time to stop and take a look back at the year so far. In particular I’d like to provide insights into how we used the available development time and what we were able to achieve for the community this year.

Search and Browsing on SUMO

Late in 2011 we had found out that our site needed some serious improvement in it’s search and information architecture. We tackled our search issues right away, and with the help of our UX designers and Susan, our information architecture expert, we spent the first 3 month of this year to come up with a site structure that would not only speak to our current users, but would also be flexible enough for future products. And while we implemented some of the resulting suggestions right away, we then took another quarter to test the new information architecture rigorously in the real world, before we wrote the first line of code. I’ll have more to say about that in a future blog post, but I wanted to take the time today to look at our development efforts for this year.

In very broad strokes, we spend the biggest part of our development time on moving to a new search engine and tuning that engine to return much better results than before. We also spent a large chunk of our time on measuring and displaying our key performance indicators (KPI), the metrics we take to measure our success as SUMO. More recently we have focused the majority of our effort on implementing the proposed new information architecture and a new “One Mozilla” design that will bring us visually closer to the existing Mozilla ecosystem.

Where did all the time go?

For the first time this year, we also tracked what user roles we served with the development time we had. The following table charts the number of points we spent, each point stands roughly for one day of development. As you can see the total number of points varies throughout the year as the constellation of the development team changes. We separated the user roles into “contributor”, “user”, “sumo-team”, and “dev”, which is used for infrastructure work. That is not to say that the classification was always clear cut. For example a lot of the development time  spend on contributors was also beneficial for the sumo team and the other way around. You can see all individual sprints on Scrumbugs, if you want to have a closer look.

 

Legend:

  • Contributor: Code changes that affected contributor of the site the most
  • User: Code changes that affected visitors of the site the most
  • SUMO Team: Code changes that affected SUMO staff the most
  • Development: Infrastructure work that didn’t benefit any one role in particular.

Community Focus

As is clear from the data we put our focus on the user experience this year. However we also invested heavily into the experience for the most important aspect of SUMO: contributors. I don’t want to list the dozens of individual bugs that were fixed and smaller feature that were added as you can quite easily see each of our sprints on Srumbugs. but I wanted to take the time to mention some of them as a reminder of what we worked on for individual contributors this year.

Forum contributors

  • Forum contributors can now add links to KB articles easily by searching for them in the “add link” overlay, which removes the need to open a new window, doing the search and linking manually.
  • We are now hiding questions that are older than 90 days and don’t have any answers from most parts of the site, as well as hiding all threads that are older than 180 days, so that we can focus on the threads in the forum that need our attention the most
  • We added a feedback indicator to the forum, that now tells us how far we are away from our goal to answer all incoming questions within 72 hours.
  • Forum contributors can now use the magic hat, that will offer them various small snippets that they can use to ask for more information, or answer recurring questions with 3 simple clicks.
  • Also, we are now only bumping questions to the top when there is a reply and ignoring other activity, to make sure we can focus on the most important questions.

KB contributors:

  • KB contributors can now send messages to all recent contributors of an article, even if they approve their own edit.
  • We added a remaining characters counter to the search summary. Google only shows the first 160 characters of a site as the preview, and after deciding to make that the search results summary we also added a counter to make sure we stay within the limits.

Localizers

  • The “approved” mail notification now mentions the approver and the changes in the body, so that people can save a round trip to SUMO.
  • In the same way, the “ready for localization” email now features a diff, so contributors can tell from their inbox how much effort a new update would take.
  • We are now showing messages above English articles, if the visitor is coming from a localized article, and we ask people to help us with the translation of that article into the language of the visitor.
  • Localizers can now see all navigation articles on their L10n dashboard, which saves us searching for it on various documentation pages.

Army of Awesome:

  • The Army of Awesome snippets can now be easily edited on SUMO, since they are KB articles now, instead of being in code.
  • The Army of Awesome has now statistics that more accurately display the effort of our community and our goals.
  • SUMO members can now stayed signed in on the Army of Awesome and answer tweets without having to log-in to Twitter each time.

All:

  • We have added a simple quoting feature for private messages, that now makes it possible to cite text in a reply and giving context to a reply.
  • We have adjusted several time frames on the KB dashboards to be able to react to changes more quickly
  • Most parts of SUMO now feature time stamps that consider the time zone of the user instead of being fixed to Pacific Time
  • Support forum and discussion forum posts of users are now displayed on the profile pages of all users for quick reference.

What’s next?

All in all I’m very proud of what we all have done so far and I can’t wait to see in production the many changes that are planned for this year, the most important of which is currently under development: The new information architecture and redesign. The new iA has been on our minds for most of this year already offers tremendous wins for users and contributors alike, and I’ll soon blog about the project and its expected effect on our site. For now, a big thank you goes out to all sumo developers, contributors and members. You are what makes SUMO so awesome!

Firefox for Android Sync screencast

Firefox for Android has been rebuilt with a native front-end for performance and usability. The new app includes an update to the killer Sync feature that brings your tabs, bookmarks and settings from your desktop and tablet to your smartphone.

This screencast provides a high-level overview of Sync setup and use. It also shows how easy it is to completely clear all of your private data, history, bookmarks and top sites from the app when you want to.

This screencast was created with androidscreencast.jnlp, so there is some jerk and gradients that don’t reflect the true beauty and feel of the new mobile browser. Enjoy it on your Android 2.2 smartphone when the Beta lands on Google Play later this month!

Firefox for Android demo screencast

Firefox for Android has a speedy new front-end that we’ve been documenting on SUMO in preparation for the Firefox 14 release of the nativeUI to Google Play sometime this month. In this screencast, I show how Firefox on Android 4.0 renders WebGL and HTML5 pages with a bunch of fun interactive games, videos and animations that I control by touching or tilting the screen of my Samsung galaxy nexus.

This screencast was created with androidscreencast.jnlp so the frame-rate adds some jerk and gradients. You can have the buttery smooth experience after you install the new beta on your Android 2.2 device later this month.

Many of the demonstrations included are from Mozilla Developer Demo Studio.

SUMO Thread analysis: Better Tools

At SUMO we always want to help our contributors help our users. To further this goal, we have begun analyzing SUMO threads, to see how we can help contributors improve their responses, and hopefully help more users. To help this goal, I and some other members of the SUMO team have analyzed a week’s worth of threads to try to find holes in our current process.

The Process

We analyzed all threads created on SUMO from April 1 to April 7. There were 365 total threads for this time period. We then arranged these threads into categories, 41 to be precise. These categories range from “Website Looks / Acts Wrong” to “Firefox Crashes” and everything in between.

Now, out of these categories, 23 of them (or 56%) have less than 5 threads per category, which was too small for analysis. Another was because of the Java blocklisting, which while it may be interesting for another analysis, for this case we just discarded those threads.

Then, we chose those categories that had the most useful information for our purposes. How many threads had responses, how many were useful responses, how many were just general replies (like “Try in Safe Mode”), etc. These threads turned out to be the following:
Firefox Crashes (19 threads)
Website Looks /Acts wrong (41 Threads)
Firefox is Slow (10 Threads)
Problems Caused by Plugins (10 Threads)

The Results

Out of all these threads, it became apparent that over half (50-60%) of threads have just very basic, general troubleshooting answers. These threads were also the ones that had very low (~20%) reply rate from the original poster. It seems from this that users want to reply when a contributor addresses their issue more directly than when there is just a general answer.

The answers that we found were not General Answers or Solid Answers were as follows:
Needs better Troubleshooting (roughly 12% of questions)
Too technical (Roughly 7%)

The rest of the questions that did not fall into these 3 categories were those with actual solid answers. While they may not have had a solution marked, they did have answers that, from how well they were written and how they addressed issues relevant to the original poster, seemed that they would have a high chance of fixing the problem. If we can increase the rate of users coming back to SUMO to update their questions, that will help the number of “Solid Answer” threads go up.

One good thing we found in our analysis was out of the 4 main groups of questions, only one question did not have an answer! This means we are doing really well on making sure we reply to 100% of threads.

Solutions

From the analysis, it seems that if we can help contributors provide more useful answers, we should begin to notice a higher percentage of solved and solid answers. To help with this goal, we have come up with a few different suggestions that we can begin to implement immediately:

Contributor guidelines:
Provide documentation on SUMO for contributors. This can range from how to begin diagnosing different issues (crash IDs, extensions, websites, etc.) to just general help for interacting with different users. We can give common issues, how to reply to them, tools to suggest to users, tools not to suggest, etc.

Contributor Workshops:
Beginning Class: Once every X weeks we have a class to teach people who want to contribute or have recently started contributing the basic ways to respond to threads, troubleshoot, act professionally, etc. These don’t even have to be ran by Mozilla Staff, experience and trusted contributors could be asked to help run these.

Special Guest Class: Developers, SUMO Staff, etc. can come and have a webinar to explain new features in firefox, how they work, what some common issues may be or are, and types of feedback they are looking for. Example, a Firefox dev in charge of the pdf.js feature could have a session about what it is, a basic overview of how it works, some known issues, how to fix them, and asking the community to keep an eye out and give feedback on X Y and Z. Then have a Q & A Time.

Specialty Webinars: Every so many months, or as needed based on feedback, the SUMO Staff gives sessions on diagnosing Hangs, how to read a Crash ID, website troubleshooting, etc.

Help Wanted!

Now, all of these are just ideas, for now. Obviously the sooner we get better tools to the community, the sooner we can improve the service we give to End-Users. We would love to get feedback from the community on ways they think that we can improve the currently available tools. Nobody knows ways we can help the community better than the community, so the more input we can get from you, the better! You can ping me on IRC (:Tyler), send me a message on SUMO (tylerdowner) or leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you and hear all your ideas! Specifically we would love feedback on these areas:
1. How useful is this current analysis, do you want to see more information from it, should we repeat it, if so how often, etc.
2. Do you feel these tools will help the community (you!), do you have suggestions, or even totally new ideas?

Mobile Michelle: Up Up and Away

I joined Mozilla last month to serve as the SUMO Firefox Mobile Support Coordinator and it has been so exciting I wanted to invite you to become a Superhero with me.

Superpowers don’t come easy, so I’ve been participating in lots of exercises to increase my strength.

I attended a brainstorming session about use cases for mobile Firefox during my first week. We discussed everything from educational tasks, such as learning the recipes for a variety of mixed drinks, to traditional business communication needs. It was a passionate dialogue about mobile users, their characteristics, and how those characteristics drive needs on the mobile web.

There were a few takeaways from this think tank that I think we should consider when designing mobile support:

  • Every piece of data is useful and precious
  • Sometimes a data plan is too expensive and free wifi is not readily available
  • The internet can cause fatigue

I keep these in mind while planning the project to achieve SUMO’s mobile goal for this quarter, to make Android a top tier platform on FIrefox for Mobile Help. The plan proposes development of new knowledge base articles to describe Troubleshooting, Privacy & Security, and Advanced topics along with documenting new features. I also plan on making some changes to existing content to optimize for small screens, improve visibility of support resources and grow our community of experts.

Do join SUMO and participate in developing this content and in answering user questions with me. It has been incredibly rewarding to help new Firefox for Android users and I think you’ll enjoy it too. Just register and add some feedback on the Discussion tab for any article that you think needs some work, every extra voice will improve the final articles a great deal.

Firefox for Android is really new, so if you want to influence the direction of this technology, you should join in the conversation on the #mobile channel, I’m michelleluna, so say hello! All of the development and test engineers along with user experience designers, marketing and product managers and new folks like me hang out there.

If you’re in San Francisco, join our next meetup where we talk about Firefox for Android and enjoy brewery delights.