Friday, September 21, 2007

SUMO knowledge base to be live September 28!

Thanks to all the hard work of the SUMO community, the SUMO knowledge base will be going live to the public on Friday, September 28th!

We will initially roll-out the knowledge base with links from blog posts and one link from the current Firefox support page. We will be testing the stability and scalability of the site while getting valuable feedback on the support. After the initial testing and feedback phase, we will begin to roll out the site to a wider audience.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed thus far. It has been an amazing team effort! If you want to get involved, visit our "get involved" page.

FYI-- we will have a timeline public for the forums and the live chat by the end of next week.

Welcome David Tenser!

Please welcome David Tenser, our new SUMO Project Manager! We are all very excited to have David working on the SUMO project and back in the Mozilla family.

David is a longtime contributor to Mozilla and the Firefox and Thunderbird support sites,
authoring major parts of help content from the early days of the Foundation. Originally from Eskilstuna, Sweden, David has a BS and MS informatics and computer science. David was most recently Chief Software Engineer at Emsize AB in Sweden, where he led the development of supply chain software in the packaging industry. He recently participated in the Mozilla Memory bank project-- you should check out his conversation with them.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Updating the update page

As you likely saw when you upgraded to the most recent version of Firefox, we show you a landing page to tell you that you have updated to the latest and most secure version of Firefox. We have also traditionally used that page as a way to communicate to you (and all the other users), most often about add-ons. We think that page could use a little work....

Below you will find the screen shots of the new versions of the page. Please check them out and give us your feedback.

Our primary audience is people who have not tried add-ons before; either because they have never heard of them or they don't quite understand what and how useful they are. We hope to use the learnings from this effort to continue to improve how we communicate the "customization" benefit of Firefox across all of our properties.

We will be testing two versions of the update page. The first version is similar to our current update page, but with a design, copy and UI changes. Please note that with both versions of the page, we have included the "release notes" to tell people what changed when they updated Firefox as well as an easy way for them to go to their homepage if they are not interested in trying out add-ons.


















The goal of our second page (below) is to introduce the user to specific add-ons from the start. We think that even if these specific add-ons aren't appealing, the user will quickly "get" what an add-on is and will be interested in seeing more.
















This page is the "landing page" that users will click through to if they are interested in seeing more add-ons. This page will also have a link to the full add-ons site. We will be testing two different versions of this page: one that shows 6 add-ons to users and one that shows 10. For all pages that show add-ons, we will be rotating add-ons through and tracking to see which ones were downloaded the most often.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

SUMO meeting postponed to Friday at 3pm pacfic time

Sorry for the late notice, but this week's SUMO weekly meeting has been postponed to tomorrow at 3 pm pacific time.

Looking forward to our call tomorrow!

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Please give us feedback on the forum home page mock-up

We have been having lots of back and forth about the design of the SUMO forum home page. After much discussion and feedback, we have developed this mock-up:


For a general reference for comparison, please check out the SUMO homepage: http://support-stage.mozilla.org

Goals of this page:
1. To ensure that the user has searched through the knowledge base.
2. To get the user to search through the forum to find an answer to their problem.
3. If they can't get their answer in 1 or 2, we want to make it easy for them to ask their question (we are currently missing a good explanation of how the forum works-- maybe that is a call-out box that we link to-- any ides?)
4. Make it easy for people to log-in and/or track their current questions

I would appreciate your thoughts and feedback here.

To get involved with the SUMO project, check out our contributor page.

Join us for our weekly SUMO project meetings

This will be a weekly, public call to discuss the progress of the SUMO project. Please join us!

Thursday from 2:00 pm - 2:45 pm pacific time

Phone call details:
  • California: 650-903-0800 then extension 91
  • Toronto: 416-848-3114 then extension 91
  • Toll-free: 800-707-2533 then password 369
Then, enter your bridge number : 280

IRC: #SUMO