Every other Thursday we’re organizing a SUMO day where we try to answer all the questions coming on the support forum. This Thursday, May 24th is a new SUMO day!
We’ll be answering questions in the support forum and helping each other in #sumo on IRC from 9am to 5pm PST (UTC -8).

Join us, create an account and then take some time on Thursday to help with unanswered questions. Additional tips for getting started are on the etherpad. Our goal is to respond to every new question posted Thursday, so please try to answer as many questions as you can throughout the day.

Last time, on May 10th, we managed to reach 100% of questions answered! Can we do it again?

Do not forget:

See you all on Thursday!

This tutorial was created with androidscreencast.jnlp so there is added jerk and gradients that aren’t in the actual product. Enjoy the great new UI and performance (and Flash support) on your Android 2.2 phone or 7″ tablet.

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

A little more than two years ago when I joined the support team, one of the first things that struck me was that most every support procedure we had involved a long list of troubleshooting steps. The idea seemed to be, let’s try to identify the exact cause of the problem and just fix that. That sounds reasonable but the practical implication of that often isn’t: Is your software up to date? If yes, let’s turn off your plugins and see what happens. Did the problem go away? No? Does the problem happen in safe mode? If no, let’s try turning half of your extensions back on. What about a new profile? Great, now just copy places.sqlite from your old profile to your new profile.

What a mess. What mere mortal has the time, skill and patience to work their way though all that? And if the thing that needs fixing isn’t easily reproducible? Forget it. It’s now become a part-time job. I suspect that for many people, it’s just easier to switch to another browser since you’ve already got one installed on your computer. Problem solved.

So the support team worked with product and engineering to create the Reset Firefox feature. The first implementation of this is a button on the Troubleshooting Information page (about:support). What is does is create a new profile and migrate your bookmarks, passwords, cookies and form data. Everything else gets set to the defaults.

I have to say, this thing is like magic. You basically get a brand new Firefox installation without the penalty of losing all your data. This is especially useful as a quick fix for the thousands of posts we see on social media where people often express vague complaints about Firefox. “Firefox is slow.” “Firefox crashes too much.” “Firefox sucks.”

The big gap in the current implementation is that, for the most part, people won’t know about this feature unless we tell them about it. Future plans involve making it discoverable. Soon we’ll give users the option to reset Firefox when it crashes on startup for the third time. And the really big thing will be giving Windows users this option when re-installing Firefox. Maybe one day the phrase, “I tried re-installing Firefox but it didn’t do anything” will go away.

Read more about Reset Firefox on the support site and then download Firefox Beta and try it out.

Notes:
• This may be broken in Nightly or Aurora. Only try this in Beta.
• It only saves bookmarks, passwords, cookies and form data. You will lose your add-ons, Sync settings, open tabs and tab groups.
• It only works with the default profile. If you’ve opened Firefox via the command line or shortcut with a profile that isn’t the default, you won’t see the Reset Firefox button.

• Notes from this SUMO meeting (video recording didn’t work).
• Rehan Dalal joined the sumodev team!
• We need your feedback on article titles by Thursday. We’ll start renaming articles on Friday.
• We answered 100% of questions asked in the support forum last week!
• Current SUMO development sprint – 2012.9
• Next SUMO meeting – Monday, May 21st (call in details & meeting notes) at 9am PST. Please add your comments, questions and updates to the wiki. You can also participate in #sumo during the meeting. We’re going to record and post a video of the meeting.

This screencast was created with androidscreencast.jnlp so it’s no match for the super-smooth experience you’ll get when you download the new Firefox Beta on Google Play later this month.

Average response rate has increased from ~50% to ~90% in just a few months.

A lot of things have changed since we set the goal, and they all contribute to this dramatic improvement in response rate:

• Our community has grown bigger and is a lot more active. This makes answering questions more fun than before.
•  We have started to host bi-weekly SUMO days focusing specifically on answering forum questions. Initially pioneered by Michelle, nowadays they are run by Madalina.
•  We have improved the start page by introducing basic browseability that we’ve previously lacked. This has reduced the number of new questions in the forum and is part of the massive project to revamp the information architecture of SUMO to significantly increase the number of users who can help themselves on our site.

The increased response rate has a number of other side-effects as well, such as an increased chance of the user getting back to us to let us know if the answer solved their problem. The solved-rate has more than doubled since November last year.

This is just the beginning. We have yet to fully roll out the revamped site and information architecture mentioned above. We also just introduced some new cool features to the forum that makes it easier to see how many questions are still unanswered:

SUMO regular Tobbi is working on a Canned Response feature that will make it much easier to quickly respond to questions. You can watch a screencast of the work in progress. It’s already totally awesome!

Big thanks to everyone in the SUMO community who work hard to respond to our users’ questions! Without you, this wouldn’t have been possible.

Speaking of the forum… what are you waiting for? It’s SUMO Day today, so head on over and answer some questions!

1. One of our top priorities right now is improving our search results. To that end we started an initiative to rate KB and forum results as equals, based solely on the content instead of showing KB articles on top and forum posts at the bottom. We hope that this step will result in better search results by higher click through rates. This is a project that will take more than one sprint to be implemented. We completed the first of 3 phases in this sprint and are planning to implement the rest over the next sprints. You can read Will’s bug comment about it, if you want to know more about the gory details of the unification work.
2. We were also able to implement a feature in the forums that gives our community an indicator for how we are doing and shows everyones impact on the forum: We call it the forum feedback indicator. It shows you how many questions were asked in the last 3 days and how many have a reply. It also links to the questions that haven’t been answered yet. The progress bar is orange, for any values below 100% and turns green when all questions are taken care of.

As with every sprint we also fixed a number of annoying bugs, and you can always follow along on the excellent scrumbugs. Here is the list for the 8th sprint.

However I’d like to point out one specific issue, that was bugging us in the forums for quite a while, creeping back when we thought we had squashed it: In some cases, a question displayed “No replies”, even though it already had replies. That bug is now hopefully fixed for good.

Big things this week

• Notes and video from this SUMO meeting.
• Ibai did a presentation about Kilimanjaro.
• Madalina and Rosana talked about the recent MozCamp (wiki page, Cape Butler).
• Tyler talked about support thread analysis (blog post).
• Thursday, May 10th is SUMO day!
• Contributor IRC meeting is Thursday, May 10th at 6pm GMT+1
• The Reset Firefox feature is awesome. Download Firefox Beta and try it out.
• Current SUMO development sprint – 2012.9
• Next SUMO meeting – Monday, May 14th (call in details & meeting notes) at 9am PST. Please add your comments, questions and updates to the wiki. You can also participate in #sumo during the meeting. We’re going to record and post a video of the meeting.

As many of you already know, every other Thursday we’re organizing a SUMO day where we try to answer all the questions coming on the support forum. This Thursday, May 10th is a new SUMO day!
We’ll be answering questions in the support forum and helping each other in #sumo on IRC from 9am to 5pm PST (UTC -8).

Join us, create an account and then take some time on Thursday to help with unanswered questions. Additional tips for getting started are on the etherpad. Our goal is to respond to every new question posted Thursday, so please try to answer as many questions as you can throughout the day.

Grab your cape and join us on Thursday!

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?