The San Francisco 2018 All Hands flew by and so did the last two months. I cannot tell you how grateful I am to have been able to attend this event.
If I were to look back on some of the highlights, they would be pretty nitty gritty detailed. But I will share with you a few of them.
Meeting jscher2000 in person was quite an amazing experience. He is one of the contributors around the Mozilla Support Community present for over 10 years. He is certainly a people person, cares so much about helping the user with the easiest course of action to a better Firefox experience and continues to enjoy being a part of the community. Aside from him only being able to attend one day of the week, the interactions between him and the other contributors that were invited to attend were priceless. Many conversations that you may read from behind your computer on [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors this webpage] came to life during that one day.
My second favorite highlight was meeting some of the French community – Pascal and Christophe. They showed me a lot of the content that they bring to events around France and the world to talk about Firefox VR development, Firefox FR support on social networks, and many other open source projects around the French community. Did you know they have had their own forum since before SUMO? (I hear some chuckles in the background) I also learned a lot about their culture and that many of their users are regular users just like you and me. (Compared to some of the power user communities out there) It opened my eyes to the many different communities all over the internet that provide help to Firefox users.
My third and final was talking to Cynthia and Noah about the upcoming motivations for the SUMO community and the engagement in the social program. During that hour we came up with different ideas on how to engage more people in the program and some of the ideas that they wanted to see happen as more contributors joined the program. (I know we have it on a post-it somewhere.)
(Also, don’t forget some of you went to In-n-Out for the first time! And I heard that some people tried riding electric bikes across the Golden Gate bridge on a nice brisk day! I am so happy that community members had this bonding experience!)
1: 1 SUMO help right now:
If you ever get an invitation to an All Hands, please go if you can. Witnessing the CIID research drive the SUMO team with Open Innovation to help prioritize experiments and projects for the second half of this year side by side with the community was amazing. These experiments are what is driving the community discussions right now. I would highly recommend you check them out as a member of the Mozilla Support Community. Please subscribe to them so you never miss an update.
At the SF All Hands, decisions were also made and are currently in the works. The projects that were prioritized in these discussions help these three SUMO objectives: improve community self-sufficiency, deliver support models for new products and support channels, increase returning user satisfaction when asking for user support.
So you may see the CSAT survey on the sumo site start to work again. You may see discussions around top user issue and see more reports around product releases. You may see a second experiment around Google Play Store reviews and you may see support channels for these new products become part of the support conversations on IRC or in the forums. New contributors are being recruited to help with mobile support, as well as helping monitor new experiments on social media and in the forums. The support is expanding beyond desktop, but also focusing on satisfying users with quality answers to encourage their return and continuous use of Firefox.
Mozilla and Marketing are focused on keeping the Firefox Desktop User, and enriching new mobile use experiences and visiting other planets. SF All Hands MoCo Plenary Session – June 12, 2018 (Watch the recap to understand “the other planets” reference)
What does that mean for user support forums?
The support.mozilla.org questions forums will still be the main official place for support. Even though it is mainly in English, content translated from English articles still support the majority of users that come to the site looking for help in a different language. There are also the Spanish, Czech, Finish, Hungarian, Indonesian(Rocket etc), Portuguese, Slovenian, Sebian and Turkish questions forums, with some being more active than others. There is not too much change on that front. But did you notice the new Firefox for Enterprise forum?
Trending user issues in the forum come from internal and external discussions around Mozilla’s products. (Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, LinkedIn to name a few) However, what is being reported on The first are the continuous reports of top user issues around each of the releases since Quantum.
The team aspires to have a frequent top issues report for each release to communicate to the Product Project Managers and to continue those conversations for more ongoing user input for product decisions. Roland’s wiki pages, the community’s reported discussion threads from each release, and filed bugs from within the community and SUMO staff all contribute to this reporting effort. THANK YOU for helping giving a voice to the user from the SUMO support channels.
Please join in the latest: discussions here as we search for long term solutions for fixing dashboards and user issue dashboards mentioned in the previous blog post.
Ongoing, the Firefox for Desktop and Mobile browsers are starting to include more Shield studies for users that have opted in to provide feedback. Telemetry data help directly influence product decisions. So if you are using it, they are keeping it.
So what is next? Well, there are new products, like Firefox Reality, a new Firefox for Android, (known as Fenix) and a number of other mobile experiences like Scout, Notes, and a DNS for HTTPs coming to the Mozilla portfolio. So expect some new support strategies and potentially new support channels.
(Did you catch the Google Play Store Review Global Sprint? Remember that new tool?)
Does that mean there are going to be new platforms for support? No, but the current one is getting a facelift. The developer Statement of Work for the SUMO redesign was planned to get the site up to Mozilla’s global brand standards. This is way overdue, if you remember, the new design was back in July 2017, we just had a new brand announcement at the end of July as well. Check out the designs, aren’t they beautiful? https://dev.sumo.moz.works/en-US/
When it comes to more ”day to day” business, it’s mostly ”same old, same old”. We keep helping open source product users with the issues they encounter. We want to get more organized and more self sufficient, though. Can you imagine running the whole site on your own? ME TOO!
So what would you need a community manager for? Ideally day to day functionality on the site. Notifications, the site being up and making sure no bots or spam push the site off the network (darn DoS attacks!)
Never fear, you are not alone on this mission to support Firefox users. Isolation does not a community make. But just in case, one of the action items from our recent explorations was to have an emergency response plan for the community when something does go wrong. Remember “Contributors have ownership without agency” – that is where you come in!
What does that mean for Social Support?
In case you missed it…. See Mozilla Social Support and the next steps after the SF All Hands
Featured in our next blog post (Top issues and what an emergency response team can do about it) Want to write a blog post for SUMO? send a pm to an admin on the forums!