The User Advocacy team recently took park in an offsite with the rest of the Engagement organization (Branding, PR, Support, Community, etc.), and we decided to try an interesting experiment.  Our amazing developer Will Kahn-Greene made a fun hand-drawn version of our input feedback form.  We then decided to have some fun while gaining insight by printing out enough copies to get feedback from all of the conference attendees.  We gave everyone open-ended instructions to fill out the feedback form on any of our products so that we could present the results later on that week.

Our results were interesting, coming from a group of internal power-users familiar with our latest products.  In general the feedback was focused on Firefox Desktop with a good mix of positive comments and comments on areas where we need to improve.  Some of the comments even contained interesting product ideas!  Given that the majority of this audience likes to be on pre-release channels of our products, we also received a great amount of quality feedback about Australis.  It was also good to see that, as a company, we’re able to still look at our products objectively and discuss places where we need to do better!

Some of the positive themes that we kept hearing about were Firefox’s great customizability, its fast performance, and that Australis is a big UI/UX improvement.  Some areas that we were told needs improvement are sync setup/latency (improved in Firefox 29 with Firefox Accounts), stability especially with 3rd party plug-ins, and providing users a clean and intuitive user experience especially for less technical users.

Let us know if you have any suggestions on how to improve this exercise in the future, and feel free to use/adapt our physical input card (we’re all about the open source :p )!