Your feedback for the new SUMO support forum needed

Hi,

We need your help in designing the presentation of the support forum statuses. If you have been following the contributor or the platform meeting, this is probably old news for you, but for everyone else: Big improvements to the support forums are coming.

A few month ago we set out to evaluate the support forum. The insights were partially surprising and partially confirmed our suspicions. The good news is: We are helping a huge number of people with their Firefox questions. However, the report also showed that we have two big issues:

  1. In too many cases people don’t come back, so we don’t know whether we are really helping them
  2. In too many cases we leave people hanging when they come back, either because we forget to get back to them, we’re out of our depth, or the question is not completely about using Firefox.

This quarter we set out to address these issues one by one:

  • We are looking into ways to let people easily reply in the forums when they receive a message from us, ideally they won’t need to even log in. This should increase the number of forum threads where we do get feedback on the solution we provided.
  • We have enlisted the help of the SUMO helpdesk to take care of issues we can’t solve alone. We can now escalate questions and have them spend time with us and the users to find the solution.
  • The heldpesk will also cover questions that are not completely about using Firefox.
  • We have introduced a new model for questions, specifically “states”. A question either “needs attention”, is “responded” to or is “done”. This way we can very easily tell which threads we haven’t responded yet, needing our attention the most.

Now, the challenge is to find a way to present all of this information in a way that is useful for as many contributors as possible. That includes current and future contributors. We have created a first mock-up, that you can see here: http://note.io/182uu9X The discussion around that has already started and you can follow along here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=928901

We urgently need feedback on this, because it will be a large scale change, that will affect every contributor using the support forums today. In particular we are interested in answering the following questions:

  • What in particular are you looking for when using the support forums? Open questions, questions with lot’s of replies? Questions where you have replied?
  • Are their certain combinations of filters that make sense to you and that should be the default?

Please leave your replies in the forum. We will use this thread to develop this mock-up further.

Thanks!
Kadir