As a multi-pronged approach to figure out what the heck is going on here, we considered a couple options:<\/p>\n
- \n
- Implement a feedback button\/form on the home page, allowing users to tell us what is on their mind \u2013 more on this below<\/li>\n
- Modify our tracking so that we can see the percentage of visits that are derived from people hitting the F1 key on their keyboard \u2013 the SUMO team will soon be discussing the details of this change<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
For approach #1, we initially implemented a button in the bottom corner of the page (button and feedback form are pictured below).\u00a0 This page sees nearly 10,000,000 visitors monthly, so we were fairly sure that we would be able to understand some key insights rather quickly.\u00a0 Unfortunately, events did not play out as expected.\u00a0 Over the course of nearly a month, we had fewer than 1,000 total responses, which translates to a click-through rate of roughly 0.0001% (ouch!).\u00a0 To boot, there didn’t appear to be any revealing patterns or insights within the responses.<\/p>\n
![\"kampyle_example_form2\"](\"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/files\/2009\/08\/kampyle_example_form2.png\" "\\"kampyle_example_form2\\"")
<\/p>\nAt this point, we felt bewildered and didn\u2019t know where else to turn.\u00a0 So, what did we do?\u00a0 We implemented a pop-up.<\/p>\n
Let me stress that I hate pop-ups<\/em>, hate them.\u00a0 Given our circumstances, we decided to run the feedback pop-up question for just a 24-hour period and show it to 60% of visitors to the SUMO home page (they saw it when trying to leave the page).<\/p>\n
![\"kampyle_popup2\"](\"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/files\/2009\/08\/kampyle_popup2.png\" "\\"kampyle_popup2\\"")
<\/p>\nThe findings were amazing.<\/strong> Firstly, out of 700 total comments, only one or two people said something negative about the pop-up itself.\u00a0 Many comments were along the lines of, “Firefox is great” (someone even pointed out that we should have included a positive category within the survey form).\u00a0 Here’s one example:<\/p>\n
\u201ci admire this site and this browser. it is faster, and safer,…….. so many add ons that can use and its fun…… i think this is the best internet browser that i have…. i using ubuntu 9.04 and its work fine…tnx more power to you…. and to your team….\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Secondly, we were able to confirm a hypothesis \u2013 nearly half of the traffic to the SUMO home page appears to be accidental (e.g., a user accidentally hitting F1 on his\/her keyboard).\u00a0 The screenshot below comes from Kampyle’s dashboard (they’re the feedback analytics firm who helped us with this project) and it shows a breakdown of people\u2019s feedback by category.\u00a0 That blue slice of the pie is “Arrived by Mistake”\u2026 that\u2019s huge!\u00a0 Even though it shows as 40%, we\u2019re guessing that the true percentage is closer to 50%, as some folks arriving by mistake likely closed their tab\/window within a fraction of a second and missed our feedback question.<\/p>\n
[As a side note, this is a perfect example of why pure web analytics \u2013 alone \u2013 can fail us (analysts, marketers, business managers, etc.).\u00a0 Without hearing real comments from real people, we could have easily been led down the wrong path by relying solely on the data.]<\/p>\n
![\"results_summary\"](\"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/files\/2009\/08\/results_summary.png\" "\\"results_summary\\"")
<\/p>\nLastly, we wanted to look at the exact feedback left by people visiting support.mozilla.com by mistake.\u00a0 The vast majority indicated that they indeed realized that they had accidentally hit the F1 key.\u00a0 Diving in a little further, we wanted to share a small sample of actual comments.\u00a0 Enjoy!<\/p>\n
“actually the cat<\/strong> walked on the keyboard”<\/p>\n
“bent over to pick something up and accidentally leaned on the f1 key”<\/p>\n
“Cat<\/strong> jumped onto laptop”<\/p>\n
“CHILD GOT A HOLD OF THE KEYBOARD AND STARTED PUSHING BUTTONS.”<\/p>\n
“finger too big.\u00a0 finger hit f1 by mistake.\u00a0 stupid bigfinger.”<\/p>\n
“i was dusting, its nice to know this site exists.”<\/p>\n
“I was stretching in my chair, and next thing I know, I’m on the FF help site. OOPS!!”<\/p>\n
“I was using a netbook in the dark and thought I was pressing 1 but I hit F1 by mistake. Aside from that I’ve usually found the firefox support site quite helpful on the rare occasion that I’ve needed it.”<\/p>\n
“my 2 year old was playing with the keyboard”<\/p>\n
“My 9 month old was playing with my keyboard.”<\/p>\n
“My baby likes to grab my computer and press buttons.\u00a0 She grabbed my keyboard and held the F1 button down so the Support site opened in about nine tabs.”<\/p>\n
“My cat<\/strong> stepped on my laptop. :-P”<\/p>\n
“My daughter is always pressing it. I never knew which button it was before now.”<\/p>\n
“my fat finger syndrome is acting up again”<\/p>\n
“My nails are long and I constantly hit the F1 button.”<\/p>\n
“now I know which key my baby hit when he was banging on the keyboard.”<\/p>\n
“Oops. Accidentally hit F1, but wow! The support site is great! Lots of info. I may have to come back intentionally!\u00a0 Thanks for a great product!”<\/p>\n
“the key was hit by the telephone”<\/p>\n
“Yes, I arrived at this site by pressing F1 key. No matter how I came here but would like to let you know – I love Firefox and thanks for provinding us this great product.”<\/p>\n
“cat<\/strong> hit keys”<\/p>\n
“Cat<\/strong> on keyboard”<\/p>\n
“Dropped food on keyboard”<\/p>\n
“my cat<\/strong> hit the help key….lol”<\/p>\n
“My cat<\/strong> pressed F1, but it’s cool”<\/p>\n
“my pet rat walked over my keyboard and hit the F1 Key LOL – Sorry!”<\/p>\n
“No clue–my cat<\/strong> was wandering around and probably stepped on something but it was nice ending up here because I’m seeing all kinds of things that look very interesting.”<\/p>\n
“my son was hitting some random keys on my laptop and suddenly I get this.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Let’s start with the punch line \u2013 roughly 50% of people arriving at Firefox Support (support.mozilla.com) do so accidentally.\u00a0 And yes, cats are a common culprit!\u00a0 Below is the story of how we arrived at this insight. The metrics and … Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[103,101],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/60"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}