Firefox/Onboarding

Our onboarding flow has always been mainly a "default" experience — the result of many small decisions instead of a comprehensive plan. Largely that's a result of how we’re organized internally. If you look at onboarding from the user’s point of view, you’ll see the work of many individual teams with their own agendas and goals (e.g., Product, User Experience, Creative, Mozilla.org, Legal, Marketing, etc.). To address this, we’re taking a user-centric approach, working together as a cross-functional team to build a new onboarding experience in a holistic and systematic way.

Completed Work

• Search Engine Marketing (2014 - ongoing): 90% of people who end up on our download page get there from a web search. Research showed that a large number of people click on search ads knowing full well that they are ads but expecting, through experience, that companies buy the ads for their own products so this link should take them to the right place. The problem with Firefox is that we had ruled this out as cost prohibitive. In our absence, third-parties bought ads against our brand terms (e.g. "firefox", "download firefox", "mozilla"). This resulted in having the majority of test participants end up on third-party sites where Firefox was used as a lure to install crapware (and worse) on their computers. It was a horrible experience. We’ve fixed this problem with an ongoing SEM campaign. So now we have an ad followed by our #1 organic result. This has resulted in the millions of people finding the correct download page and has also increased our organic downloads.

• Make bookmarks easier to understand (Fx 47 - 49): Research showed that many users were confused when they created a bookmark by clicking the star and they didn't see it visible in the top level of the the bookmarks menu (the animation having given them the impression that their bookmark "went in there"). One user spent 1:50 looking for her just saved bookmark. We identified a few improvements that we thought would fix this, including displaying the 5 most recent bookmarks in the top level of the menu. Subsequent testing confirmed that this did indeed solve the problem. Meta Bug 1219810
• Various quality improvements (Fx 46 - 52): We identified a number of smaller quality issues during our Onboarding Summit in Oct. 2015 that we also worked on in 2016.
  • Bug 1041514 - Don't show default browser prompt on first run if a user opts out in the installer
  • Bug 384336 - Firefox window should start up maximized on first run on small screens
  • Bug 1229614 - Make the firstrun page responsive
  • Bug 1274633 - Remove additional first run pages
  • Bug 1229636 - Remove new tab first time use message
  • Bug 1229626 - Firefox is not pinned to the taskbar when using the stub installer and not making it the default browser
  • Bug 1189038 - When Firefox is the default browser you shouldn't be able to uncheck the check on startup setting
  • Bug 1232679 - Improve the Firefox start menu tile on Windows 8/10

Links

• Meta bug for our MVP (planned mid-Feb. funnelcake test)
• Google group: desktop-onboarding.
• Email: desktop-onboarding at mozilla dot com
• #onboarding in irc or #onboardingux on Slack