Let’s Help Beginner Users of Firefox

Ken Kovash

3 responses

Each month nearly 40,000,000 people click on this button within Firefox:

bookmark_toolbar_v2

And then land here:

gettingstarted_page

From past analysis, we know there are many unknowns about this user interaction.  For example, what are a user’s expectations upon landing here? and why do so many people instantly leave the page without clicking anything?

To help address some of these unknowns, we recently extended our user outreach efforts to this page, providing users with the option of leaving feedback.  (We previously discussed our current user outreach program in relation to both the Firefox install and update experiences.)  More than 4,000 people have provided feedback over the past two months (to see how, click here and then click the orange feedback button), and below is high-level breakdown of those comments:

gettingstarted_pie_chart

Next, and perhaps most importantly, we can also see the “satisfaction” score given by each of the cohorts above (scale is 1 to 5):

gettingstarted_satisfaction

Given this information, a couple things seem abundantly clear:

  • Of the 40,000,000 people arriving at this page, many are beginner or newbie users of Firefox, or of the internet/computers more generally
  • This cohort of people is left feeling dissatisfied with the experience we provide them

So, how can we take these insights and turn them into action?

First, we’ll plan to make this page a part of our optimization roadmap where we’ll be able to experiment with radical new concepts, while also considering how this touch point fits in with the broader Firefox user experience.  In the nearer term, though, we should probably consider some quick and easy wins as a temporary band-aid.  Would adding a Firefox Support related element (example below) suffice?

gettingstarted_sumo

3 responses

  1. Mouly wrote on :

    I think the feedback might be biased – since only users who are motivated to take additional action are providing the feedback. Also you don’t know if the users giving the feedback immediately leave the site.

    There is a mismatch between the link “Getting Started” and the contents of the page. Users might expect to see getting started with Firefox. But what they see is links to common websites. I would try a variation page with content to achieve some goals with firefox.

  2. Dan wrote on :

    Before I turned off the bookmarks toolbar, I quite often loaded the page by mistake. Often when trying to middle-click-close a tab, and accidentally going a bit too high. Something that tabs-on-top fixes, incidentally.

  3. Patrick wrote on :

    I’ve introduced a lot of users to Firefox in the past. Many of these users were internet novices and basically not very experienced regarding computers. Often, I’d sit down with them and introduce them into how to enter an internet address (no, not in the Google search form, you need to enter it in the URL bar), how to click on new tabs, how to manage bookmarks, how to open multiple tabs, how to use the search bar and so on.
    These kind of things would be, what I’d expect behind the “Getting started” link. My “Getting Started” page would provide some step by step guides that introduce the important features of Firefox (like how to surf the web, tabs, bookmarks, search bar, awesome bar, history, addons), fully localized with screen shots.