Michael's Notes

I'm going through the whole SUMO experience and taking lots of notes as a Firefox user and as a SUMO contributor. I'll also be looking at how other great support systems work. These are my raw notes and ideas.

Raw Audit Notes

These are my notes from personal observation and from doing a few user experience tests. From these notes I'll be generating recommendations for things we can change now and recommendations for things we can include in the new KB PRD. These are not presented in any particular order and items aren't assigned any kind of importance.

Getting started with SUMO

• Can't find the help menu or people don't know to look in the help menu. I think the help menu is associated with OS built in help which is generally pretty crappy. They don't really expect to be taken to a website. We need other ways to let people know about the support site.
  • Mac help menu has a search but that doesn't search SUMO - it searches unrelated documents on your computer.

• Searching - in general you have to think about what to type - how specific should you be? Need good browsing options.
  • In a test search results keyed on the word "not" and listed random forum topics resulting in lots of searching through the forums (and not the KB - because the search offered only searched the Forums).
  • The search should have picked up on "passwords" instead of "not" and show https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Username+and+password+not+remembered as the first result. We really need to take a closer look at optimizing the search results.
  • As a result of the poor search results, the tester ended up in an almost endless forum thread loop, which isn't an ideal problem-solving experience (if a KB article exist for the problem, it's always better than specific forum threads)

• SUMO start page doesn't really tell the story that it's made by the community. That info is in a tiny box in the sidebar.

• The word crash doesn't appear anywhere on the SUMO start page yet it seems like a pretty big deal if you look at live chat or twitter.
  • If you have Firefox quits or crashes as your problem and you go to SUMO you see lots of problems but not quits or crashes - so what do you search for? What is it called? Is it (crashes) called something else because it's not listed on the page with all the other problems?

• Suggested searches in the big search box seem to me like they should take me to a category page, i.e. the "Bookmarks" category page – not a search results page. When I click a link I expect to go to a page not search results. Yes the link is in a search box/section but still it seems off to me.

• Search results are kind of overwhelming. After finding SUMO, I have to figure out what to search for and then I have to weed though a thousand search results!

• What is up with the navigation on the top right? It's different on the start page and all the internal pages. Why?
  • When you try to follow the right hand navigation in order you get skipped around - it's very disorienting.
  • Navigation in upper right - "Get Personal Help" confusing wording

• All the main SUMO pages have a big yellow search box at the top even when the supposed purpose of the page is not searching. Also some of those search boxes search different things - that's not obvious at all. I didn't notice that until many many times through those pages.

• Difficult to tell where the search results take you - Article or Forum (they are not distinguished from each other).

• Clear and straight-to-the-point language should be the general theme of the whole website.
  • We have rainbow dolphins on mozilla.com - the language of the site should compliment it.

KB Articles

• Language of the articles - We have rainbow dolphins on our home page! The articles should match that tone while still be respectful and considerate of the fact that people are having problems with Fx.

• Overall article design above the fold should be about helping you determine if you are in the right place - highly scanable!
  • I'd like to see related articles and search in place of the actions box. We're doing this for the helpfulness tests.
  • Also I'd like to see the related articles have the option of being manually set.

• Platform specific screenshots are good! They help let you know you are in the right place.

• Opening paragraph needs to quickly help you determine if you are in the right place. That can be used in conjunction with related articles and search being located in the actions box spot.

• Article page titles need to match what you clicked on to get there. It's really confusing to click on a link called "Awesome Bar" and be taken to a page called "Location auto complete"

• People don't seem to read. Embed videos directly and put them above the instructions. We will be testing this.

• Contributors should get credit on videos (like they do on articles, translations, forum posts).

• I think we should point people to related tutorials to help prevent future SUMO use. This can maybe be done as part of related articles or maybe as a recommendation at the end of an article.

• Video doesn't play when clicked - you have to click play (so two clicks to see the video). This can be solved by embedding the video inline.

• Without narration it's hard to know when the video is over.

• Without narration you can't explain choices in the video (in this case it was clear recent history - there were many items that you could clear that weren't explained)

Support Forums

• When I go to the support forum it just looks like a search page! I question whether I'm in the right place or not.
  • There is only a tiny tiny link on the support forum home page to the actual support forum. This is like trying to find the phone number for a company and they hide it 18 pages down somewhere to discourage you from calling. That pisses me off.

• I'm not sure about this popup survey on the support forums. It has the behavior of spam.

• Support forum initial survey gets in the way of what I expect. I expect to see a forum and search for my problem. Instead I have this crazy long thing to click through.
  • Support forum survey - step 3 - Ask this? or Next step? - This is way too much thinking going on here - it's REALLY frustrating.

• There are various search bars around that search different things (KB or Forums or KB+Forums) but they all look the same. It's possible to not realize this and get stuck in a loop of just searching through the forums while missing KB articles that could solve your problem.

• Links to mozillazine website not very helpful - bad layout, looks confusing.

• Answer to a question (with Windows listed as OS) gave windows specific instructions. A tester using a Mac got lost trying to follow the instructions because the menu choices are different.

Live Chat

• Where is live chat? - Way too hard to find.

• Live chat closed - please come back later. No other information is easily visible. The live chat hours are listed in the sidebar. It took a long time to discover them there. Why are they not displayed right there where the we're closed message is?
  • Live chat closed message should show you the next time it's open.
  • Live chat - click for more options takes you to the same page(?) with the hours? That's incredibly confusing.

User Experience Videos

• Dylan - finding answers to questions and finding more information about Fx features. Ogg video 25min
• Ryanne - answering a question on the support forum and finding out more information about getting involved as a community member. Ogg video 24min