Support/Kitsune/Roadmap2012
Kitsune strategy 2012
The SUMO Goals for 2012 are: retaining users, improving products, and growing the community as a meta goal. Specifically we want to maximize self service efficiency, reach a 100% action rate in the user-to-user support, and be able to analyze our data to back up our product improvement suggestions.
=Self service
In order to maximize self service efficiency we started a large scale ux research project last year. We began by an heuristic analysis of the support site, and based on the outcome of that decided to commission a taxonomy research study. The taxonomy research took the entire first quarter of 2012. Our development resources in that quarter were in large part spent on the integration of a new search engine, since the old one proved to be too limited to be improved according to the heuristic analysis and in anticipation of the results of the taxonomy research. The second quarter of 2012 will see the implementation of the research recommendations. They include improvements to the navigation of the KB, the search and search results pages as well as the article display itself. This will be the major source of improvements for the self service area in 2012.
The other angle of improving our self service support is looking beyond the English speaking user base. While the implementation of the ux research recommendations have the potential of benefit all users, they only have this potential in non-English languages, if support is available in one of the languages our visitors speak. To that end, we will invest in improved localization tools that will make it easier to translate articles as well as keep them up to date.
We spent a large amount of time in the past to improve the forum for contributors and users asking questions. However millions of people read through questions and answers in the forum every month. We see this as self help as well, and will improve the forum view for this use case moving forward. Visitors should be able to clearly see the answer and context to a question that is identical to theirs.
user to user support
For the user to user support we decided to reach a 100% action rate in 2012. We came very close to that towards the end of the first quarter. Moving forward we want to provide tools to our contributor to make it easier to react to threads in order to sustain the high action rate. Furthermore we want to increase not only the action rate, but also the rate of closed questions. To that end we we want to give contributors an easy way to monitor the threads they are involved in to keep the discussion going until the resolution of the question, either by answering the question or closing the thread.
We also want to expand the user to user support to languages beyond English and increase both our reach in the user to user support area as well as the self service area.
=community growth
We want to continue to use the Army Of Awesome both as an on-ramp for new contributors as well as a direct channel to lead users to SUMO. Several improvements to the Army of Awesome app, will allow us to reach more users while making it easier for contributors to get started. This as well as improvements to the process of answering threads and the localization process will make it easier for contributors to get started and to be more efficient with their time on SUMO, thus making contributions more fulfilling and worthwhile, and hopefully leading to more active contributors on SUMO.