Michael's Notes: Difference between revisions

Just to be clear, SUMO is pretty awesome and when I learned how it gets done my admiration only increased. All notes, ideas, suggestions, etc. are all about how to improve on something great.

= Raw Audit Notes =

These are my notes from research, personal observation and from doing some user experience testing. 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 are not assigned any kind of importance.  

*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.  

*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.

*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.

*Still need to do this when live chat is open.

== Contributor Experience ==

*How do you even find out about being a SUMO contributor? It's really hard to find. Just that little ad on the SUMO start page (but the people heading there are there for help not to be helpers).

*It drives me crazy how many times a day I get logged out of SUMO.

=== KB Contributor ===

*Improve the knowledge base link takes you to Contributing to the Knowledge Base.

*Chris walked me through configuring dynamic content, themes and modules and all I can say is that it made Drupal look like the poster child for ease of use.

=== Forum Contributor ===

*Tester said that she usually goes to unsolved topics or topics with no replies and then searches for topics she can answer, i.e. "video." In our forum there was no way to whittle topics with no replies down to "video." She had to manually scan subject lines.

*Where do you register? Login? Not sure if that is right. Oh that has a link to register. It says you don't have to register but do it anyway.

=== Live Chat Contributor ===

*Seems daunting when first looking at it. I'm not at all sure what to expect as a live chat helper.

**Then tester gave more specific instructions including where to look for the menu and then the user was able to fix their problem.

**What do you do when the chat is over?

=== Localization Contributor ===

*Documentation - no hello, how are you. It just jumps right into it. Looks daunting.  

*I'll need to work with Kadir on this. I haven't set that up yet.

== User Experience Videos ==

*Dylan - finding answers to questions and finding more information about Fx features. [http://reports.graymattergravy.com/demo/sumo/dylan.ogv Ogg video 25min]

*Ryanne - answering a question on the support forum and finding out more information about getting involved as a community member. [http://reports.graymattergravy.com/demo/sumo/ryanne.ogv Ogg video 24min]

*Ryanne - joining Live Chat as a first time contributor [http://reports.graymattergravy.com/demo/sumo/lc1.ogv Ogg video 28min]

== Ideas from other places ==

=== Help Article Tabs ===

[[File:Chrome-tabs.jpg]]

=== How-to, overview, or tutorial videos ===

LOTS of support sites have these, including the sites for Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer. I'd love to see us have some on SUMO. I'd especially like to offer them at the end of a related KB article. Take the [https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Bookmarks Bookmarks] article for example. It has a nice screencast at the beginning that gives you a great basic example of bookmarking pages. At the end of the article it gives you LOTS of links to related articles that will show you just about everything you can imagine about bookmarks. Since this article is general information about a Fx feature and not a solution to a specific issue, it would be great is to have a bonus top Fx features/make your life easier video embeded here (and on other articles like this).<br>

Note: [http://howcast.com Howcast] has talked to Cheng and I about wanting to make a couple of videos like this. It would be great if they did but I think we should have some whether they come though or not.

=== Quickly narrow down forum posts for answering ===

Being able to narrow down the field of posts to look through is especially helpful if you only have a short time to answer questions and/or you have a special area of expertise.

*Here's a video of what I'm talking about (Ogg 2min): [[File:Forum3.jpg|link=http://reports.graymattergravy.com/demo/sumo/forum.ogv]]

=== Badges, Points, Reputation, Stats ===

I'd love to have some automatic way to recognize contributor achievements. It would be nice to try to inject a little bit of fun or whimsy into answering questions.

This idea on a whole other level would be to make SUMO into a game in the way that Jane McGonigal talks about them. Video - [http://input.graymattergravy.com/post/456614213/prostheticknowledge-jane-mcgonigal-gaming-can http://input.graymattergravy.com/post/456614213/prostheticknowledge-jane-mcgonigal-gaming-can]

=== SUMO Video Converter ===

It's one thing to ask people to contribute text but it's another thing altogether to ask for special encoded videos. It would be great to have a super simple, no fail theora (or VP8!) encoder for screencasts. [http://www.mirovideoconverter.com/ Miro makes a desktop app] and [http://firefogg.org/ Firefogg] is an addon - both are open source and basically add a GUI to [http://v2v.cc/~j/ffmpeg2theora/index.html ffmpeg2theora]. We should have a SUMO (app or addon) that optimally encodes things for the KB with drag and drop simplicity.

=== Screenshots with Flickr-like notes ===

Instead of having contributors mark up screenshots in an image editing tool, we could build a notes tool right into the article editor.

[[File:Note.jpg]]

=== User focused blog - kick ass with Firefox ===

This is another idea about going beyond solving immediate issues. Maybe [[Michael%27s_Notes#How-to.2C_overview.2C_or_tutorial_videos|those cool videos I mentioned earlier]] could also live on a blog that collects great tips for getting the most out of Firefox. This is not the super technical things like messing around with about:config but easy tips that we all learned from living and working with Firefox.<br>