What an amazing launch we’ve had so far! At the time I’m writing this, over 6.5 million people have downloaded Firefox 3, and from a Firefox Support perspective it shows. The majority of the support questions we’ve received the last 20 hours have been about Firefox 3.
This launch was an intensive stress test of our new support system. With any software release, issues can quickly become very frequently reported and need to be escalated. We were on full alert, and had previously setup specific rules for how to handle cases when issues are surfaced. Whenever a major issue was reported multiple times in a high frequency, we would file a “critical” priority bug to get the solution to the problem documented in the Knowledge Base and then seed it into the top 10 article list of the front page.
We had to do that a couple of times yesterday (Firefox 3 upgrade reverts bookmarks and other settings to older version and Firefox 3 will not start on Mac OS X 10.3.9). This is just the beginning, though, and we are continuing our mission for improved support. Jason is working on a list of the most common issues reported so we can hand that over to the development and QA teams. We would also like to figure out exactly how much promoting a common issue to the front page helps us. The relevant data here seems to be the ratio between a specific problem vs other problems, and how that data changes when we promote it to the front page. This is just one of the metrics we would like to have in order to continuously improve SUMO.
With the powerful group of helpful people who teamed up around the SUMO project, we were able to help countless of new users. And we definitely had lots of fun while doing it! Yesterday, I was helping around 15 users using Live Chat. In some of these chat sessions, trainees (hi Koko and Frankieo!) were watching while I was helping the user, in order to give them a taste of how the Live Chat experience is like. After some sessions, we also tried the other way around (me watching/mentoring while the trainees were interacting with the users). All in all, it was a very fun, collaborative, but also challenging experience, and we all learned from it. I hope to see the new trainees again today, and tomorrow!
I’d like to take the opportunity to thank all the loyal and incredibly helpful contributors of the SUMO project, and welcome all the new ones. Without your hard work and dedication to Mozilla, we wouldn’t be able to be as responsive to our users as we were. Thank you!
Wow, we’re up at 7 million downloads now! That’s 500,000 new downloads while I was writing this post. Either I’m an extremely slow writer, or people really like Firefox. :)
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