Support/SumoDevRoadmap2009

SUMO Development Roadmap 2009 -- Making the vision for SUMO a reality!

Q1

Improve performance (SUMO 0.9 — January)

• In our community meetings, a key reason for frustration among volunteers is the poor performance of the SUMO website.
• This milestone will focus on improving the performance to eliminate this concern among our contributors.
• Bug list

UI/UX polish (SUMO 1.0 — February)

• Improve SUMO user and contributor experience
• UI polish and usability testing
• Fix all those small and annoying bugs that we never have time to fix
• Bug list

Screencast support (SUMO 1.1 — March)

• Implement screencast support for the Knowledge Base per specification finalized in Q4 2008
• Bug list

Other noteworthy things to fix in Q1

• Optimized SUMO start page to reduce bounce rate and increased number of people who find the solution to their problem
• Browse KB by "category" with a nice tag cloud
• Logging in as contributor should take you to the contributor home page to ensure our contributors are getting the information they need to contribute

Q2

Clear l10n overview and polish (SUMO 1.2 — April)

• Create dashboard for localizers showing a clear overview of which parts of the site is localized and which isn't, ordered by priority
• Localized support forums for locales that request it
• Fix remaining l10n bugs
• Bug list

Automatic metrics dashboard (SUMO 1.3 — May)

• Implement automatic metrics dashboard combining Omniture & TikiWiki DB stats, including CSAT
• Automatically generated weekly dashboards
• Ability to run simple queries like start and end date for custom reports
• Bug list

Web based Live Chat (SUMO 1.4 — June)

• Replace Spark with a web based client that seamlessly integrates things like the backchannel #sumo and info relevant to Live Chat helpers:
  • List of common issues with instructions on how to troubleshoot
  • Prominent links to places like the Contributor Forum and other info we want to promote
• Bug list

Other noteworthy things to fix in Q2

• Weekly metrics for increasingly popular search terms (as opposed to just looking at the top search terms, we should be looking at the search terms that has had the biggest increase in popularity since last week, as a way to spot early trends)
• RSS feed for incoming support questions — Instead of having to log in to SUMO in order to read the latest incoming support questions, a convenient alternative would be to just subscribe to an RSS feed (also known as Live Bookmark in Firefox). This way, people could set their mail client (e.g. Thunderbird) to notify whenever a new question is posted.
• Smart forum thread filters — When browsing the forum today, all questions are listed, including the ones that are already answered. Many contributors are more interested in looking at threads that haven’t been answered yet. Others might want to see only the threads they’ve responded in. We should allow for an easy way to filter the forum view based on what’s relevant for our visitors.

Q3

Streamlined WYSIWYG editor (SUMO 1.5 — July)

• New Knowledge Base article editor with:
  • WYSIWYG editing
  • Simplified no-nonsense UI
• Bug list

Karma system (SUMO 1.6 — August)

• Implement Karma system, including personal, encouraging stats like number of people you have helped
• Make the community and profile more personal
  • Photo avatars of contributors shown at the bottom of KB articles rather than just their user names
  • Thank you notes where appropriate, e.g. when saving an edit, when posting a proposed solution to a forum thread, or when ending a Live Chat session with a user
• Bug list

Live Chat in other languages (SUMO 1.7 — September)

• It should be possible for helpers that speak other languages to log in and specify which languages they can provide support in
• Users would then see a list of languages corresponding to the currently logged in helpers, and would be able to check the languages he/she can accept help in
• This also includes localized UI for Live Chat and possibly separate backchannels (e.g. so the Japanese community can speak with themselves without mixing their chats with the en-US channel)
• Bug list

Q4

Live Chat scheduling solution (SUMO 1.8 — October)

• We need something that will allow people to commit to specific time slots that are convenient for them, while still seeing which slots other people have offered to take or would like to take — think of it as a shared calendar.
• The official hours of operation could then be based on the confirmed schedule time slots, rather than predefined hours
• Bug list

Polish and bugfix release (SUMO 2.0 - December)

• Another milestone focusing on catching up on the many small bugs we've likely been forced to push back on over the year
• Bug list

Untargeted 2009 goals

These goals should be merged with the above quarterly sections.

• Single login for SUMO and other sites
• Single account and karma for Firefox/Thunderbird support + other Mozilla-hosted implementations of SUMO