SUMO Blog

On Tuesday December 2nd, the bug fixes for SUMO 0.7.3 were applied to the Firefox Support web site.

One new feature that should help us get a better handle on forum responses is the ability to classify response as actual attempts to help the user, rather than something like a “me too” post or someone clarifying the problem.  Specifically, you can classify your response as a proposed solution to the problem or a request for more information. We can then have more accurate numbers on how many threads are actually getting help; and contributors and filter threads based on the whether or not a solution has already been proposed, using the “Solved Status” drop-down menu mentioned in the SUMO 0.7.2 post.

To classify your response when you compose a forum response, click on the drop-down menu just above the text area, called “Select purpose of your response:” and choose the most fitting item.

In addition, there was a major bug which caused new articles not to be assigned to any language, and prevented contributors from removing the “Content may be out of date” warning on some articles. That bug has now been fixed. You can test this out by creating a new article. As a result, localizers should now be receiving notifications of new translations again.

You can see a full list of SUMO 0.7.3 bug fixes in Bugzilla. Remember that if you see any bugs on support.mozilla.com or you think of a great new feature for the web site, please let us know about it in the Contributors Forum or file a bug in Bugzilla.

Attendees: djst, cilias, zzxc, cww, lucy

Sumo

• Weekly metrics
  • Bounce rate on start pages consistently high. chofmann, djst, and jslater are working on improvements.
• Last week’s weekly support issues
  • New Bugzilla keywords are now added for the SUMO/QA common issue tracking teamwork. Will evaluate for a brief period then announce.
  • common-issues bugs
• About this site page in review bug 413592

Knowledge Base

• Almost 200 article comments (140 since Wednesday night)
  • Caused by the major update
  • cilias will post useful comments in Contributors forum
• Filed bug 467814 for a separate article about places being locked.
  • For clarification: unchecking the “Read-only” attribute not the solution. Solution is to rename (or delete) places.sqlite and import a backup
• 3 new articles to review this week.
• “Images or animations do not show” overhaul waiting for review [1]
• cilias will post summary of l10n feedback shortly
• How to handle Firefox 2 content discussion [2]

Forum

• Users who are answering without logging in or registering. Probably a good thing, will have better stats when we start tracking statuses.

Live Chat

• Openfire server problems should be resolved now
  • Sometimes Foxkeh wasn’t showing
• Archiver broken by update, not possible to get last week’s weekly metrics
• Stats from last week: 4 new accounts, 1 account approval, 1 new user ready to be approved
• Top issues (cww to merge this with Weekly Issues doc)
  • Bookmarks in the Smart Location bar after history is cleared
  • Firefox crashes while browsing, downloading, or printing: 9
    • Plugins and extensions seem to be the most common causes
  • Passwords not saved: 4
  • Corrupt cookies, logins not saved

Roundtable

• We need to get a tools server set up so we can do automated weekly metrics and other stuff on a dedicated server: bug 467829
• bug 467018 causing trouble. zzxc to test and provide more info, and djst to bring this up during the sumodev meeting.
• Blog schedule for this week is empty/open.
  • Publish an official blog schedule for the SUMO blog?
    • Doesn’t seem like it’s needed considering the team size and blogging frequency. We just want to make sure everyone doesn’t blog the same day.

I’ve talked before about the so-called Support Funnel and how the Knowledge Base is the heart of SUMO, ensuring that people find solutions to the most common problems without necessarily having to interact directly with our support community. The reasons why this is important are many:

• It ensures that the solutions to the most common problems are written in a clear, concise, and straightforward language that is easy for our users to understand.
• It reduces the pressure of our community of volunteers since most users are self-served.
• It gives us a powerful way of tracking which problems are the most common with the help of metrics.

The Support Funnel. For more information, see The vision for SUMO – Part 2: Understanding the bigger picture.

So, how do we ensure that people find the solution to their problem in the Knowledge Base? Well, one way of finding the solution is by searching for it — something we try to make very obvious on the start page. The reason why we think searching is the best way of finding the solution is because the Knowledge Base is big. Really big. While we have a list of the most popular support articles right there on the start page, it’s hard to make it obvious that there is a lot more content in the Knowledge Base than what is shown on the start page.

The start page of Firefox Support, clearly emphasizing on the search function.

So, is everyone really comfortable searching? Actually, the almighty and ever so wise chofmann and I have started to see evidence that some people prefer to browse for the solution rather than searching for it. Among the people that visits the Firefox Support start page and doesn’t instantly leaves the page, only roughly half of them actually searches. The other half either clicks on one of the hand-picked popular support articles, or clicks on some other link on the page.

We’re not sure what the reason for that is, or if there are several reasons. It could be that people are unable to accurately describe the problem they’re seeing — considering how many people that are using Firefox today, this is not surprising. Even my older brother, who has been using computers for at least ten years, has problems describing some of the problems he has with his computer, and usually I have to pay him a visit, have a nice cup of coffee, and fix the problem myself.

Another reason could be that people simply prefer to browse a categorized list of articles instead of searching — essentially just clicking on a few links instead of actually typing. I talked to our creative genius John Slater a few weeks ago and he said that he’s usually a little skeptic about internal search engines and that he prefers to just browse.

Francisco Picolinni from the Mozilla Hispano community provided a third possible reason why people are unwilling to search — because they might not think anyone else has the same problem.

Regardless of why not everyone searches, it seems like we should work on providing a good way of browsing the Knowledge Base. We currently have a link at the bottom of the list of popular support articles saying “Browse all Knowledge Base topics.” However, the page that link takes you to is just a long list of all articles ordered by hit count — not exactly easy to navigate.

chofmann, John Slater and I recently brainstormed around how we could ensure that as many people as possible find the solution to their problem in the Knowledge Base with minimum effort. Since the Knowledge Base articles are loosely connected with tags like “bookmarks,” “location bar,” etc., one interesting possibility would be to show these tags in a tag cloud that would provide a better sense of the diversity of the content while still pointing to specific, popular topics. Clicking on a tag would filter the list to only show the articles with that particular tag.

A tag cloud around the topic Web 2.0.

Another problem to solve is making sure that people really understand that they can browse for solutions as an alternative to searching. We want people to understand that Firefox Support has the answer to their problems and that they should stay on the site until the problem is solved. This probably means we have to take a closer look at how the start page is designed to see how we can better communicate this. If you have ideas on how we can achieve this, we are interested in hearing them!

What we really want a user with a problem with Firefox to feel when visiting Firefox Support is: “These people are here for me, and they won’t give up until my problem is solved.”

We just started to work on this, so stay tuned for more…

Attendees: djst, cilias, cww, zzxc

Sumo

• Weekly metrics
  • Not as much KB traffic as before — localization saturation?
  • Number of contributing locales would be interesting to monitor. cww to test if it’s possible.
  • New metric: Active forum contributors — contributors who have posted in at least 5 threads last week
• Last week’s weekly support issues
• cww has meeting with timr about QA/SUMO common support issue system

Knowledge Base

• For IE users + ActiveX articles updated
• cilias to update the Running Firefox on mobile devices article and also add info about iPhone. djst to ask PR for an official reason why we can’t/won’t/aren’t allowed release Fennec on iPhone.

Forum

• Would be cool if the #sumo bot could track how many people click on its links to the Forum — could write a script for it (but would depend on better hosting of stuff like this on Mozilla’s own servers)

Live Chat

• Traffic was up last week despite Thanksgiving.
• 5 active contributors last week
• 6 new accounts, 2 actually helping

Roundtable

• Need SUMO tools server for stuff like foxkehbot, stats, queries. djst to talk to Laura about it.
• We should have a welcome e-mail that’s sent out to people who register on SUMO (or Live Chat, which is still technically a separate registration). zzxc to write email template that we can use to send manual e-mails for now, until we have this set up automatically.
• SUMO logo is going through the legal process until we can take it to the next step.

A couple of weeks ago, the Firefox Support web site was updated to SUMO 0.7.2, which includes a number of bug fixes and a couple of new features. You may have already noticed some improvements.

If you have started a forum discussion, and get the answer you were looking for, you can mark the discussion as solved and rate the experience with solving your problem. It’s a great way to find out how satisfied users are with the forum.

Contributors looking to help people in the forum will then see that the discussion is marked as solved, and know to skip over it.

You can even set the forum to only display discussions with “Solved” or “Unsolved” status! There’s a drop-down menu called “Solved Status” at the bottom of the forum.

There is now a link at the top of forum pages (i.e. breadcrumb) to take you back to the forum list.

For a full list, you can see our list of SUMO 0.7.2 bug fixes. Remember that if you see any bugs on support.mozilla.com, or you’ve thought of a great new feature for the web site, you can let us know about it in the Contributor Forum or file a bug in Bugzilla.

Over the past few months, the support team has been working to identify top issues and pass this information along to the rest of the community. For Live Chat, we are now keeping weekly summaries on the Live Chat issue guide, a page that documents common issues both for live chat helpers and for QA team members assisting with live chat. This page is useful for anyone wanting to help with live chat, as it contains a brief overview of the most common questions we get. Information maintained there includes background information on symptoms, links to knowledge base articles, links to troubleshooting explanations, the current status of each issue, and suggested steps to troubleshoot each problem.

In addition to being a guide for new helpers, the issue guide allows everyone to quickly see which information we want to collect from users with specific issues. When helpers discover new information, they can let others know by posting in the Contributors forum or by talking to other helpers in #sumo. In either case, room monitors and administrators make sure that useful information is shared in bug reports or on Weekly common issues.

As I discussed last month, people from all over the Mozilla community can help with Live Chat by assisting helpers with new issues. Anyone can get started with this by joining #sumo on irc and configuring your XMPP (Jabber) client. For QA team members or other community members wanting to assist live chat helpers, the Live Chat issue guide is useful to get a glance at what helpers are seeing. If you know of an emerging issue that we should be investigating, let us know by posting in the Contributors forum.

Since we are able to only directly help a small portion of users in the forum or in live chat, it is important that the knowledge base is kept up-to-date as the primary source for help by ensuring that known solutions are documented there. The majority of frequent issues have documentation which is linked to from the Live Chat issue guide for easy reference. To assist with documenting new issues, each undocumented problem in the issue guide is noted as needing documentation, so that documentation can be created when enough information is received.

For more information about Live Chat, read our documentation on getting started. You can assist other helpers using any XMPP client by following our guide to connecting with alternate clients. (If you want to answer your own Live Chat questions, you will need the open source Spark client.) If you have any problems connecting, join #sumo on irc to get help.

There’s been a discussion in the mozilla.support.planning newsgroup (a place where many of the discussions behind the SUMO project are taking place that for various reasons aren’t happening in the Contributor Forum) about an about:sumo newsletter, similar to how we already have newsletters for Add-ons (about:addons) and the whole Mozilla project (about:mozilla).

SUMO contributor myles7897 originally proposed the idea, and more importantly, created a pretty fantastic mockup of how such a newsletter could look like and include:

We’d like to hear what you think of this idea and whether or not this would be useful to you. The idea is that we would blog about various SUMO related things as we already do, and then collect and package the most interesting bits every month and turn that into this newsletter format.

Thanks to myles7897 for creating the mockup, and to Bubo for proof-reading!

One week after our fourth Support Firefox Day (SFD for short), it’s time for reflection! This time around, Cheng was doing most of the work of pulling it all together, as well as hosting a fair share of the individual sessions throughout the day. That said, it was very much a display of great team work where everyone from the SUMO team was involved to ensure that the day would become a success.

Chris hosted the localization sessions during the European and American time slots, while Cheng was covering for Chris when he was enjoying his good night’s sleep during the Asian time slot. Matthew worked hard on the technical backend, making sure we had a decent landing page and were properly set up with Mogulus and other technologies used throughout the day. We were also privileged with Asa’s great technical expertise during the American session.

Initially, the focus of the event was going to be 100% localization. However, before the agenda for the day was set in stone, Mitchell contacted me about getting the SUMO community involved with the Mozilla 2010 goals discussions she had initiated on her blog. She asked me if I wanted to lead a discussion about this and asked what would be the most appropriate channel for such a discussion, and I immediately thought that the upcoming SFD would be a good opportunity.

Mitchell and I sat down a few weeks ago when I was visiting the Mountain View office to discuss how we wanted to go about with this discussion, and after a few ideas being bounced back and forth, we agreed that we would primarily be using IRC for the discussion, but also to use video to kickstart it and explain why Mozilla’s goals are important for everyone in the community (since it’s really the community that has the power to make our goals become our reality).

The Asian and European sessions were hosted by Cheng and me, respectively. Since Cheng lives in Mountain View, we thought it would be cool if he could actually broadcast the Mozilla 2010 American session live with Mitchell. If you missed this discussion, you can still watch it from the SFD4 start page. In the video area, click “On Demand” and then choose the Mozilla goals 2010 session. A summary of the thoughts and ideas that were gathered throughout the course of the day can be found on this wiki page.

It was an interesting challenge to split this SFD up into three separate time slots for the Asian, European, and American time zones. For me personally, it was pretty exhausting since I chose to attend to the full day, which meant that I started my work day at 5:30 am and ended it at (I think) around 11:30 pm.

But more generally, we were surprised to see that there were more people attending from Europe during the American session than there were during the actual European session. Although when you think of it, it actually makes sense, since many people in our community has daytime jobs that makes it hard for them to participate in the middle of the day, making an event starting at 7 pm more natural to attend to.

It was great to see so many people getting together in our IRC channel #sumo, both existing and new community members. I personally think this is the most important part of a SFD — to ensure that people get together in real time to meet, chat, and have fun. We had lots of that during the day (I need to dig up a good IRC quote from the day to show an example!).

A huge thanks to everyone that participated, both actively and passively, last Friday! It was a great experience and we all enjoyed it very much. And of course, a special thanks to Mitchell and Asa for setting aside time from your busy schedules to join us in making the day a Great Success!

Attendees: djst, cilias, cww, zzxc, lucy

Sumo

• Weekly metrics
  • All articles in “Bottom 5 rated “understandable” articles” had more yes votes, than no votes.
    • Could be because people who find an article hard to understand don’t read it to the end. Doesn’t make the stats less valid though.
• Last week’s weekly support issues
  • Cww to blog about getting leads for issues
• SFD post mortem
  • Almost 100% of visitors came from (something).google.com/firefox (default Mozilla start page)
  • What worked well?
    • Having someone moderating (Asa), backing up the main person was really useful. Good to get questions highlighted; easy to miss when you’re doing an interview at the same time.
  • What could be improved?
    • Give people an earlier heads up at the MV office
    • We could do a better job of putting prerecorded on demand content before and after the actual event
    • Should collect email addresses prior to event to send out reminders
    • Should collect email addresses during the event to follow up with new people interested in getting involved
  • Next SFD let’s do it on a Thursday to ensure more contributors are available to help new people the day after the event
  • Stuff left to do
    • Wiki page summarizing Mozilla 2010 goals so far…. everyone to provide feedback and cww to upload to the Mozilla Wiki.
    • djst to blog about the event

Knowledge Base

• Low traffic:
  • 0 articles in review que for the past week.
  • What changes there are have been new translations.
• Notable article changes:
  • The ActiveX article is being changed to not mention the ActiveX of Mozilla plugin.
  • SHOWFOR will be removed from the For Internet Explorer users article. [1]
• I’ve proposed some changes to in-product help. [2]
• Looking for someone to write the article on Private Browsing bug 463477
• Article editor PRD is under review. [3]

Forum

• Contributor forum should only allow new threads for logged in “Contributor” users
• Need to make it clearer that the Contributor forum isn’t the Support forum

Live Chat

• Fewer helpers last week, only 4 people taking chats.
• Total chat sessions down about 10%, percent answered still ~75%
• 6 new accounts, 0 new approvals, 1 unapproval
• Top issues: sqlite (cookies, bookmarks) corruption, preferences not saved, firewall connections, Mac random crashing (all bug 459531)
• Trainees queue and joining queue when closed will be fixed as soon as SVN is pushed live
• Security bug 464779 doesn’t currently affect our builds, but it does affect Openfire’s own binaries.

Roundtable

• Weekly Firefox status meetings summaries up.

In just 15 minutes, the European session of our Support Firefox Day starts, where we’ll introduce people to SUMO localization and discuss Mozillas goals for 2010. For the full schedule, see the previous announcement on the Mozilla Blog.

Head over to the Support Firefox Day page, tune in to the video channel to see my Scandinavian face, log in to the chat, and engage in the discussions!