939814 - Design UI and system for easily telling users about changes to our site and tools

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Webmaker Graveyard :: webmaker.org, defect)

Description

[David Humphrey (:humph)]

We change things all the time.  Because I watch our bugs, I see hundreds of user-facing changes fly by on a daily basis.  We change things, ship it to staging, things look OK to us, so we go to prod.  Then we forget about it.

This week we'll roll over to 40K users.  Every time we do this, we affect some portion of that group, and we do nothing to message these changes to our users.

I'd like to see us develop a lightweight way to put "changes" or "features" into a queue which then goes out to prod and becomes something our interested users can see.  Maybe we do this via some comment in the whiteboard of a bug.  Maybe it happens in Jenkins.  Maybe we start another repo or a wiki, and we put lines there every time we land/change something that's user facing.  Somehow it has to be easy to do this, or we won't do it.

Then we need some new thing in the UI that you can click and see all the things that have changed recently, perhaps with links back to bugs or other info.  Most users won't care, but many will: some will want to figure out why we changed something; others will be interested to try out new things.

I'm not sure who should own/drive this.  CC'ing a few people for thoughts, and assigning to Brett to start.  Brackets does something cool with a "gift" icon that appears when there are new features (see bottom of http://download.brackets.io/).  It opens a page that shows stuff in a wiki I think.

Comment 1

[Matt Thompson (@OpenMatt :OpenMatt)]

* Great ticket. Let's discuss more in next cross-team call.

* Telling the story of Webmaker improvements and new features is a multi-pronged effort, as Humph mentions above. A few of the other pieces in the mix:  

* WEBMAKER BLOG. We should tell regular (say once or twice monthly) stories about high-level features and improvements on the Webmaker blog. This can be a chance to tell more of a story and highlight how new improvements add up to something larger. (ccing Drushka) 

* MOZILLA ALL HANDS. Surman also wants us to up-level our profile in the weekly Mozilla All Hands. We should be demo-ing new features and challenges there more regularly. 

* MONTHLY DEMO PARTIES. I love the Friday Webmaker demo sessions you guys do. I've talked with Kate and others about having a monthly or bi-monthly "Demo Party." We can bring in a group of our users to test and play around with the new features we've shipped. 

This gives us a chance to humanize and tell stories about the new features from our users' perspective. 

This doesn't cover all the other more granular requirements / pieces Humph mentions. Just wanted to add them to the mix.

Comment 2

[Erika Drushka]

+1 to telling the story on Webmaker blog and All Hands calls, in additions to Humph's suggestions. 

Brett has done a nice job in the past of covering new features in the webmaker team blog: http://webmakerteam.tumblr.com/

I'd love to help these stories get told to a wider audience.

Comment 3

[Brett Gaylor [:brett]]

As discussed in Work week:

1) Friday demos will surface new features / changes we need to communicate to our audience
2) Webmaker.org calls on Wednesday will present these to community team, as well as community team uplevelling pain points from community
3) Blog post on blog.webmaker.org will annouce changes
4) rinse and repeat

Comment 4

[Erika Drushka]

Great plan! With the change-up in teams, who will take on writing the blogs?