We recently reinitiated Funnelcake, an effort begun in 2007 to better understand the full cycle of a user’s experience — from visiting www.mozilla.com all the way through to becoming a long-term Firefox user. We are currently shipping Funnelcake roughly once per month, and we have some new insights to share based on some numbers from November’s edition.
You may recall that, last year, much of our analysis focused on the attrition or churn rate over time, i.e., what are the odds that a new user today continues using Firefox a month from today or six months from today?
For this discussion, we want to focus on another area – what is the experience of a new user at the precise moment he/she clicks on the download button?
At first glance, this may seem like an ultra simple thing to examine. However, there are indeed different hoops a user has to navigate through at this moment in their experience. Once a user clicks the download button, he/she is shown a dialog screen related to running or saving the .exe file. At this moment, two things can happen:
- A user succeeds in getting that download file
- The user does not receive the full and complete file
Looking at our download mirror data, it appears that roughly 79% of people enjoy success (#1) and about 21% of users experience the latter (#2).
The next step in a user’s experience applies to group #1. Moving forward, two things can happen to this user:
- The user can launch/run the installation file, successfully go through all the steps during installation, and complete the installation process
- The user does not complete installation
Looking at the data again, we see that of the users at this stage in the process, 79% of people enjoy success through the installation steps, whereas 21% do not (the 79-21 numbers repeating here is just a coincidence).
An alternate view of this user experience would be to ask, “for every 100 people who initiate the download process, where exactly do they end up just a few moments later?” Looking at the diagram below, you can see that roughly 21 abandon the process when they don’t receive the full download file, 63 receive the download file and complete the installation process, and 17 receive the download file but don’t complete installation.
So, what are the business insights here?
There are likely some actions we can take to improve the user’s experience during the download and installation process. I was surprised by the 21% number above… much more digging needs to be done to ensure this is fully accurate and to break this down further (e.g., by OS, by browser, etc.), so that we can start to consider product or UI related changes. With respect to the 17% number above, we are already taking action. With the help of Kampyle (a tool for these users to provide feedback), we’re eager to soon have some insights into the potential pain points or thoughts of users at this precise moment in their experience.
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