General thoughts

• Font size is problematic in many places (too small, poor readability due to serif font choice, etc.)
• Search box is *way* too prominent, especially on pages where search may not be the primary goal (Ask a question, for example)
  • If the search is the primary way to find help, it should be as bulletproof and effective as possible
  • Support/StartPageOptimization is a project that may fix this
• Knowledge Base: what is this? Too jargony - "Firefox Help" might be better
  • Support/StartPageOptimization is a project that may fix this
• I know the content is written by volunteers, but a lot of it is very chatty and needs editing.
  • Need to extend style guide to include more general writing style guidelines:
    • Write in a concise manner.
    • Apple's documentation is a good example -- Neil to provide some specifics
  • Ongoing effort to simplify text
• Sidebar text is often too small / visually diminished and not that noticeable
  • Suggested solution? Make the text darker/bigger?
• Access to various help options is too haphazard - needs to be centralized and prominent on the home page
  • Part of this is by design -- we don't want our users to "short cut" the system by skipping the KB and jump straight to the U2U support options. At the same time, we need to make it clear that there are other ways of getting support than self service. Support/StartPageOptimization is a project that focuses on fixing this problem.

Accessing SUMO as a user

• Hompage (coming from in product)
  • How can I find a breakdown of Firefox features?
  • What's new in this version of Firefox?
  • Index / "site" map? What kind of information is available here?
• "Search the knowledge base"? What is that?
  • Could use more clear, actionable text here
    • Support/StartPageOptimization is a project that may fix this
  • Where's the "search" button? (button should say "Search" or something, rather than a tiny arrow)
    • Support/StartPageOptimization is a project that may fix this
  • "Browse all Knowledge Base topics" page is a giant list - pretty inefficient / user-hostile
  • Remove this link / page completely? There has to be an easier way to access this info - search, maybe?
    • List should be sorted by popularity and should be possible to filter based on e.g. keywords/search
  • Is this stuff categorized or tagged?
• Just visited SUMO in the browser - the "New to Firefox?" should probably be moved over to the in-product page as well.
• Not quite clear on why the wording is different between the in-product and web browser home pages
  • Support/StartPageOptimization is a project that may fix this
• Searched for "How do I organize my bookmarks?"
  • Font is pretty small in the contextual summary [1]
• Not sure if the "viewed / useful" data is useful - shouldn't we just use this to prioritize results (aka not really necessary to show the actual numbers) [2]
  • Red highlight text is too strong for this information - it's at best secondary information that doesn't need to be highlighted [3]
  • Drop the horizontal line between results - too noisy and doesn't improve scannability. [4]
• Search box moves to right side of page - should stay at top of page ala Google, Yahoo, etc.
  • This was done to save vertical space in article views. Not sure what to do with this.
• Home link is pretty small - should probably be more prominent
  • Which home link?
• It would be nice to have a separate, smaller network header for stuff like SUMO so that users don't get confused what site they are on.
• KB article page
  • In general, I'd move away from a serif font throughout as it can be problematic for strong readability.
    • Needs discussion with jslater, but might be good for KB article contents
  • Does SUMO automatically figure out what OS / version the user is using? If so, we should probably bury or reduce the visibility of the "show content customized for" - confusing, noisy.
    • This will change to "This article applies to" -- however, we might want to add a prominent warning whenever a user visits an article that doesn't apply to the browser the user is currently using
• I see content that disappears on the page after a second or two?
  • extra-content
  • The result of how SHOWFOR is currently implemented. Can it be changed to filter by default OS/Fx version rather than showing all?
• Was this article easy to understand?
  • Clicking Yes/No returns no feedback - there should be some kind of notification that the user has submitted feedback: "Thank you!"
• Tranlate this article
  • Log in page text is very tiny. [5]
    • Mozilla Support
• Article feedback
  • Captcha could have more humane text ("Are you human?", something like that)
  • "Submit" button - "Send your feedback" - better wording? [6]
  • Error page: "You have mistyped the anti-bot verification code; please try again." Not that useful? Anti-bot?
  • Sending feedback to article - again, no feedback that I've done something, or what will happen now that I've sent feedback. [7]
• Users tools - Questions I asked
  • Unfriendly "Error" page - could be more humane
• Ask a question
  • Links to forum / live chat / 3rd party support should be much more prominent (not hidden in page content)
  • "Mozilla offers two official places to ask a support question: a forum and live chat" - these links should go directly to the items in question and not be jump links
  • Not quite clear what "third-party support" is, especially in this context.
• Live chat
  • What's foxkeh? Cute, but should just be a straight-forward status indication
  • "how to get started" shouldn't appear if chat is closed - when to come back should be swapped in instead
  • Sidebar content on these pages is so faint as to be basically not noticeable - should be reprioritized and redesigned
• Register as a new user
  • "Generate Password" either needs to be removed, or moved closer to the password fields [8]
  • "NOTE: Make sure to whitelist this domain to prevent registration emails being canned by your spam filter!" - should probably be rewritten to be more humane / clear (i.e. what is "whitelist", why would an email be "canned"?) [9]
  • "Select your group" is a bit perplexing. Shouldn't someone just be able to register and do both contribute and search as a "user"? [10]

Accessing SUMO as a contributor

• Contributor home page
  • Some "first access" information here might be useful - welcome, how to get started, first things to look at. Basically a newbie guide to being a contributor
  • This could be just a box with a "don't show this again" link