I arrived in San Francisco at around 10:00 PM after a 45 flight delay with Delta Airlines, but didn’t actually arrive at the incredibly Wild Palms hotel until 12:30 because of a major misunderstanding by the Hertz car rental dealer added with an unparalleled unwillingness to be service-minded and just fix the problem the right way. Yes, that’s four adjectives in one sentence. That’s how hard this hit me. And no, I can’t count.

During this first day in Sunny California, anno 2008, I made the following notes:

• Baja Fresh is still teh fresh. Seriously, plus plus one one.
• In-N-Out serve more fries than you can possibly ask for, yet you still somehow manage to eat it all up.
• The Wild Palms just got wilder by replacing their mixed fruits with American pancakes. Just the Super Size Me upper edge I needed.
• Dollars not only look like Monopoly money, they even have roughly the same value.
• Stephen Donner’s neighbors sometimes make unmotivated but seemingly exhausting ten-feet swims.
• Ruby is as cute as ever.

It’s good to be back. Really excited about meeting everyone at Mozilla tomorrow, including of course all the new people!

They say third time’s a charm. That’s true for my blog as well!

A couple of weeks ago, Seth, Stas, and Pascal did a great FOSDEM presentation of the Community Survey project and the results from the first two surveys. For people who didn’t see the presentation, the Community Survey project was launched in November last year with the goal of learning more from our Mozilla community about e.g. decisions needed to be made, or ones that already may have been made.

Earlier this week, Seth, Stas, and I had a follow-up meeting where we went through the results of the survey about user-to-user support, both to summarize the insight we gained, and also to figure out what the next step should be moving forward. Designing this survey was very much a learning process for all of us, and we definitely learned about how hard it is to ask a question in a way that eliminates the risk of misinterpretation. We also learned (or rather got confirmed) that the results of a survey can be interpreted in many ways. Designing surveys falls somewhere between science and art, which made this both an intellectually challenging and genuinely fun experience.

We made a few important findings in the results of the survey (with more to come later):

• End users and active community members have different opinions on their current community support
• End users are more interested in “visuals” in support, e.g. screenshots and screencasts
• End users value interactive help higher than active community members
• The Mozilla community is incredibly vibrant and diverse

Let’s talk a little bit about each of the above findings.

End users and active community members have different opinions on their current community support

This graph shows how people rate the quality of their local support sites differently depending on what type of user they are:

As with any statistics, you have to be very careful about making assumptions. In this case, the classifications “End users,” “Community Members,” and “Active Members” are loosely based on the participant’s answer on the demographic question, which can be read about in detail on the Community Survey Blog shortly. As an example of why it’s dangerous to make any assumptions, one person could be actively following news on Mozilla and consider him/herself as an active community member, while another person could be doing the same but not consider him/herself as anything close to a community member. Everyone is different, and with that comes different perceptions, even on things like how to define a community.

That said, it’s pretty clear in the graph above that end users aren’t as enthusiastic about the support offerings as the hardcore community members are. The reason for that is non-trivial to explain without asking more detailed questions about the situation, which fortunately we did.

End users are more interested in “visuals” in support, e.g. screenshots and screencasts

This might come as no surprise; end users aren’t as interested in reading long instructions without illustrative screenshots, or even videos/screencasts. By adding these elements to documentation, the information is much easier for people to grasp. Getting this confirmed was important to us, as one of the important next steps for SUMO after the Firefox 3 release is to get screencasts to the Knowledge Base articles.

End users value interactive help higher than active community members

When asked what assets would make the support websites more useful, interactive help such as instant messaging was rated higher among end users, compared to community members. This isn’t surprising either; less technically inclined people want more hand-holding when it comes to problem solving. That’s not limited to computer problems, by the way. If you’re not very handy, you need more hand holding when e.g. assembling an IKEA kitchen table. In my case, the hand holding I request turns more into a demonstration, where my friends end up doing the work for me. Of course, I still pretend that I’m trying to learn how to do it myself, otherwise I don’t get the help I need.

When it comes to software documentation, interactive help could obviously mean IM or IRC chat, but it could also mean making the search experience more interactive, or, again, adding screencasts to the knowledge base articles. During our meeting, Seth played a bit with the idea that by extending knowledge base articles with screencasts, you would achieve the same effect as someone holding your hand while instructing you to fix the problem. I’d definitely like to explore this further.

The Mozilla community is incredibly vibrant and diverse

Lastly, we found that among the participants taking the English version of the survey, only 40.3% of  them were actually from English speaking countries, despite the fact that our awesome l10n community helped us translating the survey into 17 languages. We’re just everywhere, it seems.

To conclude, the survey gave us more insight about our community, and we got a few assumptions about support confirmed which will help us move forward. We also learned more about survey design, which will help the Community Survey project to continually improve, just like every other Mozilla project.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Stas and Seth for letting me work with them on this. It’s been a really entertaining and educating ride. Oh, and if you guys have any free slots in the future, I’d love to do another survey as the SUMO project evolves!

As promised, here are my pictures from FOSDEM 2008:

Wow. I had such a great time at FOSDEM in Brussels last weekend and met so many amazing people, it’s hard to know where to start, and I’m afraid I’ll forget someone. Please forgive me if I do!

From MoCo, it was great to see Seth Bindernagel (sethb on IRC), Chris Hofmann (chofmann), Mic Berman (Mic), Dan Mills (thunder) and Mike Schroepfer (schrep) again. Seth and I became a dynamic comedy duo, always finding new reasons to laugh. I had no idea our sense of humor was so compatible! Speaking of laughing, I also met Mark Finkle for the first time, and I really had a really great time with him, Seth, Mic, and Zbigniew Braniecki (Gandalf) during our Sunday dinner together. We were laughing so hard that evening, it was almost painful.

From Europe, it was awesome to meet Tristan Nitot, Pascal Chevrel (pascalc), Brian King, Carsten Book (tomcat), Anne-Julie Ligneau, Gervase Markham (Gerv), Gandalf, and Christian Sejersen for the first time. These guys exceeded my expectations in so many ways, and I actually had high expectations! I’m even more proud to be part of the European Mozilla movement now.

Last but certainly not least (rather the opposite), it was fantastic to meet the countless of people from the Mozilla community. Some of them were people I’ve “known” on the internet for the last six years or so, including Henrik Gemal and Robert Kaiser (KaiRo), and it was great to finally meet face to face. Others were newer to me, but still people I’d been looking forward to meet, such as StanisÅ‚aw MaÅ‚olepszy and Cédric Corazza (Cedric). And then of course, I met countless of people that I didn’t know much, or at all, before the event, but really enjoyed meeting — Henrik Skupin (whimboo) and Abdulkadir Topal, just to mention a couple of them.

Of course, I was there for a business purpose as well: the SUMO talk went very well. I will publish the slides on the SUMO blog shortly.

All in all, FOSDEM 2008 really boosted my enthusiasm for Mozilla, and drained me of all physical energy at the same time, hence the title of this blog post. I don’t like to publish raw, unedited photos, so please be patient; I’ll upload the photos soon(ish).

Longest. Airport. Walk. Ever.

I’ll be giving a presentation of the SUMO project on Saturday at 17:30 in the Mozilla room (H.2214). Be there!

I finally gave in and bought a device that I can’t really justify because of a real need; it’s just that the “Me wants!” factor was too high to resist it. Overall, it’s a very cool device that allows me to do pretty much all of the stuff I normally do in front of a real computer, but without the bulk of a full-scale laptop that forces me to sit upright, lighten up an entire room, and listen to an increasingly intense fan (which is not an option when my workaholic withdrawal symptoms kick in in the middle of the night).

When you spend lots of money on small things you don’t really need, there is a pretty high risk that you end up being a little disappointed in the end. In this case, I’m somewhat disappointed about a few details, but it’s not as bad as it might sound in this blog post. Read on for the details.
Here’s a list of stuff that annoys me about the N810 so far:

• The UI is too small to be comfortably used with your fingers. You are more or less dependent on the stylus, which means you have to use two hands. They’ve made some things unnecessarily small, such as the numeric soft keypad displayed when the unit is security locked. It uses only 1/4th of the full size of the screen for the digits, forcing you to aim with the top of your finger to get the pin code right.
• Scrolling web pages is unnecessarily difficult. There are three methods of scrolling web pages, touch-and-grab on the web page itself, using the scrollbar, or holding down the down arrow key. All three methods have their own quirks:
• Touch-and-grab: This is the method that in theory should be the most useful, since it’s both intuitive and simple. However, the device doesn’t quite deliver; sometimes the system mistakes the grab with a click, taking you to another page (which on this slow device takes a few seconds, since you have to stop loading that page, and then click Back, and then wait a little longer for the previous web page to reload). Other times the grab turns into a text selection instead. Lastly, just as the regular Linux build of Firefox, you can’t scroll over a Flash object.
• Using the scrollbar: This method would have been a good alternative to the touch-and-grab method if it wasn’t for the fact that the scrollbar is tiny and at the very edge of the screen. The problem with this is that the frame around the screen is bulky and makes it hard to reach the edge of the screen with your thumb. In non-fullscreen mode it works reasonably well because of the added border around the browser window, which places the scrollbar at a more reachable location. Maemo team: why not use the same thick scrollbar as in the Chat and Mail applications?
• Holding down the arrow key: This is a slow and unpredictable way to scroll the page. The scolling continues for a good while after you release the button, and if you don’t hold it down long enough, the scroll action turns into a “select first link on page” action instead, instantly taking you to the start of the page again.
• Typing on the keyboard is hard. The keys don’t have any space between them, which makes it hard to “feel” where your thumbs are on the keyboard. Also, it increases the risk of pressing more than one key at the same time. Finally, the qwerty row  is too close to the screen edge, making it hard to use it with your thumbs.
• Typing on the screen is harder. For some reason, the large, finger keyboard doesn’t pop up when you tap a text box with your finger, despite the claims in the help documentation. Instead, a tiny stylus keyboard appears, which is impossible to use with your thumbs. If the stylus keyboard option is disabled, you have to click a text box with your thumb circa ten times before the big keyboard appears.
• The mail app is completely useless. It failed miserably with both my mozilla.com and Gmail IMAP accounts because its performance doesn’t scale if you have more than a few hundred e-mail messages in your inbox. It doesn’t matter if you specify that it should only download 25 or so e-mails; it keeps loading an additional 25 old e-mails every nth minute and eventually their poor Ordo(n^4) algorithms start eating up the precious resources. Webmail ftw!

That’s it, I think. My list of negative impressions. I won’t mention the fact that it’s slightly buggy in general and crashes from time to time, because I expected that and generally has no problems with beta quality software (since I’m a software developer myself).

Overall, I really like this device despite its shortcomings. The Mozilla-based browser MicroB really helps me feeling right at home. The battery life is impressive — at least if you make sure a program hasn’t got stuck in an endless loop, keeping the CPU at constant 100% utilization.

Seems like we have another Ken Kovash Day.

The most common concern people in the Mozilla community seem to have about SUMO (support.mozilla.com) is its scope — Firefox Support. Therefore, I thought I should take a moment to address the background of the project, the current scope, and finally my personal view of its future.

The Background

Ever since the beginning of the Firefox project, there has been an enthusiastic user-to-user support community around it, helping countless people with things like hacking userChrome.css to installing Java. The majority of the Firefox users back in the day had enough computer skills to find their way around the independent help sites, hosted at various places (most notably back then, the mozillaZine forums and the “Firefox Help” website I personally created). Before Firefox reached the 1.0 release in late 2004, Mozilla moved the Firefox Help content to its own servers at mozilla.org/support/firefox, where it remained relatively unchanged.

Since then, the Firefox user base has exploded. I’m not just talking about the sheer number of users here, but also the diversity, ranging from web developers and geeks (like myself), which were far more represented among the early adopters; to people with little to no interest in computers other than as a tool to get the job done — the so-called mainstream users.

As the number of Firefox end users increased, so did their frustration over the level of support Mozilla provided for the product. The number of angry support letters, e-mails, and voice mails increased, and it became pretty clear that the support offered by Mozilla wasn’t scaling to match the popularity of the product. Something had to be done to improve the support resources and make them easier to find for all kinds of users.

As a result, the SUMO project was created, after planning and evaluation of the current situation by (among others, I’m sure) Chris Hofmann, JT Batson, and Samuel Sidler. Later, I was hired as the project manager to help lead the project.

The Scope

Back to the original reason for this blog post. As everyone knows by now, the initial launch of SUMO is focused on Firefox support. The reason for that is pretty natural: with over 125 million Firefox users around the world, it is by far the most used product from Mozilla today. The second most popular Mozilla product, Thunderbird, doesn’t even come close (its user base, while respectable on its own, is less than a tenth of Firefox). Among all Mozilla projects today, Firefox is undoubtedly the one that would benefit the most from a centralized, high quality support channel.

It’s not just that, though. By focusing on getting an updated support solution live for Firefox only first, we are able to move much faster as a project. This leads to more efficient discussions, less disagreements, and a tighter project group. Simply put, we are able to reach our goals in less time than we would if we were to split our focus on many products at the same time.

The Future

While SUMO currently stands for “Firefox Support,” only the content is really about “Firefox.” The solution as a whole, including its specialized software, is about providing revamped, modernized “Support” for all kinds of end users. We are not just creating a knowledge base, a forum, and a live chat for Firefox. We are creating a support site that is all about the end users. Every part of SUMO has the user in mind — from the automatic content customization based on the operating system the user is running, to the ability to mark a topic as resolved in the forum.

When I think about the future of SUMO, I envision a support solution for Mozilla projects in general, with URLs like support.mozilla.org/firefox and support.mozilla.org/thunderbird (note the .org suffix, which sends a clearer message about SUMO being a user-to-user support solution). I even talked to David Ascher about the idea of a similar Thunderbird Support site as soon as the news about him leading MailCo was announced.

In the future, when Firefox Support is doing really well, I could definitely see the scope being expanded to make the solution work for other Mozilla projects as well (and with the open source nature of the knowledge base and forums, it could even be used by other non-Mozilla projects, just like Bugzilla is used by almost every open-source project out there).

The work we’re doing on SUMO now is there to be done for other projects as well and will come in time. We’re not limiting ourselves to Firefox because we don’t care about the other projects, but because we need to focus on where our resources are needed the most first, and then broaden the scope.

If you care about support, keep the suggestions and contributions to SUMO coming!