Support/Kitsune/Roadmap2012
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Kitsune 2012 Strategy & Roadmap | |
| Owner: Kadir Topal | Updated: 2012-03-26 | |
| Kitsune is the software that powers Mozilla's online support efforts. It includes a KB, support forums, and a twitter app | ||
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 with 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 in accordance with the heuristic analysis and in anticipation of the results of the taxonomy research. The second and third 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 set a goal to reach a 100% action rate in 2012. We came very closer to that towards the end of the first quarter with a 75% reply rate on average and one closer to 90% on SUMO days. Moving forward we want to provide tools to our contributors to make it easier to react to threads in order to sustain the high action rate. We will supplement that with motivational tools to contributors to keep everyone informed about their own impact on the forum and how close we are to our goals.
Furthermore we want to increase not only the action rate, but also the quality of answers, to that end we want to give contributors an easy way to reply with canned responses and summaries of KB articles. We also want to make sure that high quality answers get the recognition they deserve by linking duplicate questions to high quality answers from previously asked questions. Going beyond the first reply, we also want to increase the rate of closed questions by giving contributors a 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.
One big goal of 2012 is the expansion of user to user support to languages beyond English. This will increase both our reach in the user to user support area as well as the self service area. It will require some development resources while being heavily dependent on our communities for a successful execution.
Data Analysis
Through questions of our users and "me too" votes of our visitors we get a vast amount of data about issues people experience with our products. In 2012 we want to create the tools to harvest that data more easily than before, especially giving the community ways to slice and dice the threads in several dimensions, enabling us to back up suggestions to product teams with data.
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.
Kitsune 2012 Roadmap ---DRAFT!!!---
Q2 features
Forum
- Contributors can mark questions as duplicates of other questions
- Contributors can track posts they have replied to in personal view
- Contributors get feedback about their impact on the forum
KB
- UX recs w/o redesign
- Redesign implementation
Search
- Immediate search recommendations
- Tailored search
Q3 features
Forum
- Contributors can select from a number of canned responses/ wiki articles when responding to a question
- People can format their questions and replies in a simple wysiwyg editor
Search
- Near term search recommendations
- Faceting/Predictive search
Other
AoA
- Tweet filtering
L10n
- Overhaul of translation process
- Overhaul of l10n update process
The original Roadmap is here on Google Docs because editing media wiki tables is hard. The preview below is inaccurate or out of date: