For those that have used the Firefox Betas (Desktop and Mobile), you’ll have noticed a set of smiley faces that allow you to tell Mozilla if you’re happy or sad and why. What we’ve seen is that our beta userbase is a whole lot more talkative than we initially thought (at the time of this post, we’re at 597,438 pieces of feedback received). In order to deal with the scale, we’ve had to furiously develop features that help siphon through the masses of messages received. Those features have led triagers to identify over 50 bugs, help get a great feedback loop into our weekly meetings and even change the displays in our offices to see the constant feedback coming in from our users.
It’s been a pretty good success so far. Though, in my opinion, we’re only a fraction of where we want to get to as a product and initiative. There are still two major channels of Firefox (i.e. Nightlies and Major Releases) with very large, under-represented user bases who would love to give feedback on how to shape their Internet. Mozilla’s communities could be doing a whole lot more with this mass of information in terms of localizers, testers and promoters performing constructive actions within their spheres of work. Also, the gap between the future potential usage and actualized potential usage of our data is far too large.
So over the next 9 months, the team is going to be looking into all of these issues and trying our hand at solving them. What we plan to do are the following:
- Provide low-bar submission methods for defined needs from user feedback
- Allow for experimentation of the data in order to find new ways to visualize and propagate it
- Construct action item loops with triaged Input feedback for qa, localization and marketing communities
There are finer grain details here that are not really appropriate in the scope of this blogpost, so if you’re interested in helping out on anything I’ve talked about here or want to know more details, please head over to #input on irc.mozilla.org and ask away!