Mozilla.org/Redesign/Questionnaire
« Mozilla.org Redesign Central
Happy Cog has provided us with a questionnaire to fill out to get a better understanding of the mozilla.org redesign. We've reproduced it below. Please provide feedback in the last section.
Goals & Strategies
User Goals
Who are the core users of the site? How old are they? More demo info, please.
The core users are Mozilla community members. They range in age from 13 to 60 and beyond. There's no set demographic for who participates in the Mozilla community. Traditionally, community members have been male programmers, but this has grown quite a bit and now includes programmers, testers, marketers, writers, designers, and more of both sexes, all races, and every continent in the world.
What does the user want to accomplish when they arrive at the site? What is the primary action you would like them to take?
We believe people are coming to the site to find some information about the community. Many people will be looking for how to download Firefox or Thunderbird, but others will be wanting to find out about other parts of the Mozilla community (such as a link to the Romanian localization community's web site or how to get involved with QA), or looking up policy documents.
How long do you want them to stay on the site?
Some users will stay quite a while as they delve into Mozilla and learn more about it. Most will likely stay on the site for a short period (seconds or minutes) as they're handed off to an affiliate site.
Do you expect that they’ll have the latest technologies/browsers/plugins?
We *hope* they will, but some certainly won't. We'll provide some browser stats for current visitors and aim to provide the site in terms all of them can view. We may want to take the opportunity to teach people with older browsers about the benefits of new browsers and new web standards. For instance, if we host a video on the site, we could insert a short introduction about open standards for anyone who needs to use a plug-in to access the video.
What are the five most important things the home page MUST have? Why?
This is a challenge since the community is big and diverse and there's a lot of content that is important to feature. We'll need to work through this, but an initial list includes:
- Some intro text about Mozilla (seems obvious but there's not really any intro text in the current design)
- A call-out for Installing Firefox/Thunderbird (and, likely, links to other products)
- A feed from and a link to Planet Mozilla (maybe also one other news feed?)
- A link to the Mozilla Store
- Something that presents the various parts of the Mozilla community and encourages visitors to dive in
Marketing Goals and Strategies
What are your current marketing goals? How will you promote this thing? Word-of-mouth? Blogs? Press? All of the above?
Our users will arrive from all over, but most of them will know mozilla.org through word-of-mouth and blogs. Many visitors will already be members of the community and will know mozilla.org because of their interactions with other Mozilla properties. New visitors to the site will likely have heard about it through a blog or link from a different Mozilla property (like mozilla.com).
Do you have any existing campaigns established? Do you have documentation for them?
mozilla.org has never been traditionally marketed and there's no intention to change this.
UX/Information Architecture
What other sites out there do you feel does a great job from an experience point of view? Why?
The following sites were picked because we feel that they present a large and diverse amount of community generated content in a clean way:
- http://www.whitehouse.gov/
- http://www.etsy.com/
- http://www.starwars.com/ (not quite as clean as others but still a useful example)
- http://wordpress.org/
- http://threadless.com/
- http://vimeo.com/
Note: There's a blog post about this that may have comments.
Are you of the feeling ‘less is more’ (37 Signals approach), or give them the works (Microsoft)?
We're open to advice. There's a lot of content on www.mozilla.org (although we're reducing that through an archiving campaign) and a lot of content across the Mozilla community and it's not clear what's the best way to make that content easy to access.
Do you like fixed width or liquid layouts? Why? What resolution do you want to support (if fixed)?
Liquid, liquid, liquid. We can take advantage of media queries to optimize for wider widths, but the base layout should work in narrow windows. The design should scale with font size changes and accept being placed in a narrow window side-by-side with other applications. One related concern is that people be able to use it on mobile devices. Our target is for general, Fennec-like mobile browsers (as in, the Real Web™), however. The design should be reusable for other tools such as Drupal, Mediawiki, or Wordpress without major modification.
What category labels do you feel would be meaningful to your audience?
- Projects
- Developers
- Contribute
- Foundation
- About
What words do you feel would be meaningful to your audience?
- Openness
- Community
- Freedom
- Passion
- Collaboration
- Innovation
What content is searchable? Will there be metadata for content?
Right now, all content is searchable and most of it (if not all) has been indexed by Google over the years. There is no internal metadata. However some pages do have translations, so the design should have a standard way to indicate when a page has various translations available (such as the Mozilla Manifesto pages) and how to navigate through them.
Content
Who creates the content for the site? Is it written?
A wide range of people are updating or have updated content on the site. Currently there is a group of community members who is driving the content update (and content archiving and migrating) process. More information about what this group is working on is on the Mozilla.org:Planning page.
Whose responsibility is it to make content edits?
Whoever owns the page is responsible for edits, although anyone with CVS access to the site can make changes and edits. For the home page and other key pages, the set of owners is listed in the document above.
How often will the content be refreshed?
It depends on the page. Some pages on the site haven't changed much, if at all, since 1998.
Will you syndicate content via RSS? What types of content?
Right now www.mozilla.org is consuming some feeds but doesn't have any feeds of it's own. I think this will change as the site work continues.
Do you know what types of content your users will want?
Do you ever anticipate adding an e-commerce component to this?
There is a Mozilla Store (and a Mozilla Community Store) that we will need to link to, although the store itself is on a different site and has it's own design (there are three stores in fact).
Do you plan on implementing forums as well as chat?
We will likely not have forums hosted on www.mozilla.org but there are certainly forums in the community.
Feedback
Please provide any feedback regarding the questions/answers above below.
- Don't know, if this is covered by "Some intro text about Mozilla", but what I would really like to see on mozilla.org (and prominently featured on the home page) is content on the goals and work of the Mozilla Foundation like openness, preserving choice and innovation on the internet, education programme. E.g. a monthly feature on one of those aspects, telling new visitors what Mozilla does to advance the goal and why it is important. Don't emphasize too much on products, emphasize on values.
