507094 - Silly UI idea: Help > Report what sucks... (inviting feedback)

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Menus, enhancement)

Description

[Dirkjan Ochtman (:djc)]

(Prompted by http://eaves.ca/2009/07/28/remixing-angie-byron-to-create-the-next-million-mozillians/)

Now that hundreds of millions of people are using Firefox, the average tech knowledge of a Firefox user has gone down significantly. This means, among other things, that people will not know what to do with any frustration they might have about their usage of Firefox. Let's add a menu item to the Help menu that invites feedback. I've tentatively called it "Report what sucks...". It would be similar to "Report Broken Websites..." in that it goes to some online form from Mozilla.

Goals:

- Provide an outlet for user frustration
- If possible, provide a (more-or-less) human response to user problems
- Get hints on what could be improved
- Give feedback on what Mozilla is working on already
- Draw people in to become contributors

Thoughts:

- Optional contact details
- Separate fields "what sucks" and "any idea how to solve it"
- Be a first line of defense for Bugzilla
- Text to discourage Bugzilla-knowledgeable people from using it

Comment 1

[Mardeg]

Would http://hendrix.mozilla.org/ be involved?

Comment 2

[Jo Hermans]

Note: Hendrix is the website behind the feedback-form that is linked in the release notes.

Comment 3

[Dirkjan Ochtman (:djc)]

Wow, I completely forgot about Hendrix. But yeah, let's have it link to Hendrix (and I guess I can think of a few things that could be better about Hendrix, but that would be separate bugs, I guess).

Comment 4

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

I guess that every Firefox user will have at least once per month a splendid idea how to improve Firefox. If you only need to click and to write and submit your hastily typed request Mozilla will receive millions requests per month, that all need to be read, sorted and evaluated. And I wonder where to find all these employees (and how to pay them; Mozilla will be broke within a few days).

Comment 5

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

Another problem is that only Firefox users will get this open invitation; not IE users (who are the potentially new users).

Comment 6

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

I think this is a powerful and useful idea, though unsure it needs to be hosted XUL in the application as opposed to simply being a link to a webpage on mozilla.com.

Also, as Ria states, we need to think about how to process this data effectively.

Comment 7

[Ian Stirling.]

We - to some extent - don't care about processing what the millions of requests are.

If it's simply 'what do you hate most about firefox' - then simply breaking down 100 random responses into common issues may produce results.

I would also suggest that once every 1000 FF starts or so - a user gets asked a question.

This might be 'what sucks about ff' 'what do you think of feature xyz', 'what doesn't ff do this version that your other browsers/previous versions/... did'

Comment 8

[Rob]

Microsoft has this sort of feature in it's (Free) Beta of Microsoft Office 2010.

They call it "Send-a-Smile". It consists of _TWO_ Taskbar hogging Icons, a 'smile' and a 'frown'. The 'smile' lets you send a comment and the 'frown' grabs a screen-shot and lets you send a comment. 

Since it is two Taskbar Icons it lets you send comments (and screenshots) regardless of whether you are running the program or not; thus we can send them FF screenshots ;) .

We might implement such a feature in the [H]elp Menu. Instead of actual comments we could have a Scale of 1-10 to show (un)happiness. If we had comments we could limit them to 20 words or less (use the words in the comment to create a table of popular words). This would make for less work to sort the results and could be automated easily.

Rob

Comment 9

[Rob]

@Dirkjan: 

You are "reporting against Trunk" and this feature is available in Firefox 4.0b6, is it's implementation satisfactory to CLOSE your Request or do you wish to request backports to earlier versions ?

Rob

Comment 10

[Dirkjan Ochtman (:djc)]

Nope, the stuff in Fx4 seems pretty close to what I was thinking here.