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We were inspired by the Mozilla’s “Blog of metrics”. And we want to share some information about it here.
The Blog is focused on collecting, analyzing, and sharing various metrics about Mozilla’s products and enlightens the quantitative aspects of marketing and strategy. The Blog aims at improving of Mozilla’s performance on the Web.
The world of Mozilla includes many Firefox related feedback mechanisms. Crash reporting, Bugzilla and spreadfirefox.com represent some of them. Furthermore, the Mozilla team carries out the surveys about updates of Flash Player, updates of Firefox, as well as about Firefox uninstalling. The received feedbacks help Mozilla’s team to improve the Firefox and to contribute to its adoption.
The metrics help to investigate what incentives motivate the user to participate in the surveys, what design of the feedback forms provokes the most feedback, or what prevents the users from upgrading the Firefox. The upgrading of Firefox and reporting about crash on the Web pages help the Mozilla team to improve the Firefox technology. When the user updates Firefox, he receives the better version of the Web browser. The same evidence functions for the Flash update. Many sites can’t be downloaded appropriately if the users don’t have Flash or have non-updated version of Flash that doesn’t work properly.
By giving feedback about crashed sites, the user helps unconsciously to improve the Firefox. So the users contribute to the development of their Web browser and thus get the profit of their contribution later by Web surfing with the new and more powerful versions of Firefox.
The same model functions by INSEMTIVES: The project aims at developing the technology that motivates the users to solve the tasks for the creation of the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web will make the Web the better place, where the user can faster find the needed information and enjoy the using of the better product.
We find the survey results of Mozilla’s team about the participatory design quite interesting for our project. Here are some of them:
1) The implementation of the pop-up in the middle of the window with the offer to take part in 5 minutes survey (instead of having the feedback button at the bottom of the screen) increased the amount of participants enormously. Moreover (and that is really important!!!), only one or two people out of 700 total comments said something negative about the pop-up itself. http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2009/08/18/cats-love-firefox-support/
2) The Mozilla team runs the tests where they investigate what color of Firefox download button causes more clicks. With a 1% lift the winning color was green and 1% translates to nearly 2 million downloads annually that is, 2 million more potential Firefox users. Such optimization testings are run quite often by Mozilla team and the colors are optimized according to the survey results.
http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2009/06/19/firefox-is-green/
Tags: Firefox, incentives, INSEMTIVES, Mozilla, participatory design
