Common Mozilla phenomena and how to cope

(If you do not contribute to Mozilla or are not currently part of a consensus based organization this post may not be of interest to you)

Giving things names helps us better identify and talk about them. Here are some names I've created to describe common occurrences at Mozilla. These phenomena can probably be found at any organization with a consensus based culture.

"Collusion Event" -- Someone creates something cool seemingly out of nowhere. Before its planned launch the shiny new thing gets demoed and impresses lots of people. Then, at the last moment, before it's official public launch everyone tries to connect their tentacles into shiny new thing to help their own initiatives. This is great - except that it makes the original launch plan lose focus, and is extremely overwhelming (in a good way).
 
Banana Bread went through a Collusion Event, and the actual namesake, Collusion, experienced this too.

How to Cope: Again, this is mostly a good thing; the challenge is distraction. Keep your eye on the carrot! Stay laser focused on your launch while taking notes on side opportunities. Note: enthusiasm will fade fast, so follow up quickly after launch with a "Phase 2"!

"Hand Waving Moment" -- A consensus based organization classic! 

Your team works hard on getting a project through legal, privacy, governance, and more. It internally socializes the hell out of new thing. It gets approved. Great joy is felt through the project team -- finally, internal alignment! New thing gets extremely close to launch. One person who has somehow failed to hear about said new thing hears about it. Said person objects! Said person escalates. Second thoughts are had. Fear and doubt spreads. 

Launch normally happens as planned but this last bump in an already bumpy road hurts! It can sadly turn what would have been a smooth, happy launch into a sour one. You went through many bumps to get here! You feel like this.

How to Cope: Don't worry, another showing of brute force will get you over this last one - don't give up, soldier! Knowing that this will happen is half the battle. Keep this in mind, and reserve your strength to get over this final hurdle. You can do it! And the Web will be a better place if you do.

Are there other Mozilla phenomena that I'm missing? I've already heard from many of you that there are. (Fun Examples: A "Hybrid" between the two above, the "Hurry up and Wait", the "Who's on First" lack of clear roles & responsibilities). Add them in the comments, here. 

Introducing The Compliment Project

When you start paying attention to natural signs around you some cool things are revealed.

This observation combined with my 2012 New Year's Resolution to "dress better" led me to conduct The Compliment Project: I tracked every clothing compliment I received over the last 4 months and analyzed the results with the end-goal of optimizing my wardrobe.

Why? Good question! What if you don't actually look good in your favorite clothes? What do other people think you look best in? You may be completely wrong and humbled, like I was. It's always good to verify your assumptions. 

The Compliment Project lets you verify your assumptions and more.

Okay - here are the Instructions, they're easy:

Record all clothing compliments you receive for at least 3 months. Record the person, date, and article of clothing complimented.  

(Disregard compliments from your Mother and/or significant-other as these people are commonly biased outliers :))

My Top Five Learnings:

1. I receive way more compliments than I thought. My monthly average is 5 for a total of 20 compliments. This made me feel great! To give you some context: my friends would have laughed me out of the room two years ago had I told them people compliment my clothes. I dressed very poorly for a long time! 

2. There was a correlation between clothing price and compliment frequency. Unfortunately the saying that "money can't buy style" is not true for my wardrobe.

A more likely explanation could be that the very few items I buy that are not on sale may already have to be exceptional to warrant the initial cost to buy them. 

At the same time often times financially cheap but "different" or noticeable items of clothing were complimented (read on for more on that). 

3. My most complimented items were totally unexpected. I was not complimented on some of my favorite things. Ouch!

For example, my favorite accessory, my watch, which I have been wearing daily since I received it 1 year ago, has only been complimented one time the entire year. I think this is because my watch isn't that noticeable and blends in easily, which leads to another top learning that...

4. ...The Peacocking Principle holds true: People were likely to compliment what's noticeable. This makes me wonder if any of the compliments I received were based on something looking good vs. something simply being noticeable! This principle could account for roughly 25% of my compliments.

5. My Mother should dress me. This is terribly embarrassing for me to admit: my mother bought me both of my top complimented clothing items. Yes, we still go shopping as a way to spend time together. She loves making me try on clothes she can't wear. This way I try clothes I otherwise wouldn't, and have someone to pressure me into buying an item when it looks good.  

 Without further ado, tied for first place my most complimented pieces of clothing are:

Above: J-Crew Jacket and J-Crew Pants

Pretty dull pieces of clothing - right? I would have never expected that a simple pair of black cords would end up tied for most complimented item, but once you start keeping track, you never know!

Hey Mom - wanna hit the mall?

How to "Spread Persona"

"Let's think differently about data and build a world where the collection of data about me lives under my control. Let's create the building blocks so you can be the center of your online life." - Mitchell Baker

I've recently had the pleasure to join the Identity team here at Mozilla which consists of an amazing team of engineers with the mission to create an identity system for the way we'd like to live on the web.

I've been doing some thinking around how our products have spread with the help of amazing grassroots campaigns in the past. I've been bothering lots of people to get a sense of what type of campaign can help ignite the concept of Persona to a larger group of Mozillians and like minded early-adopters.

A Personal Story
Years ago on a vacation to Hawaii I remember the first time my brother handed me his laptop to show me what the cover of the New York Times website looked like without ads. It was a profound moment for me; I saw that an alternative online world could exist if you wanted it to. And Firefox made it possible.

Until that moment I hadn't realized an alternative to ads even existed. I didn't know it was even possible. I think the same holds true for Persona; people don't realize that they can be at the center of their online life and control what information websites learn and share about them.

Share The Potential
So how can we share this possibility? Share the potential, spread the word that there's a better alternative out there? Rally a critical mass to hold up their hands and let the world know that this is something they'd like to see happen? 

MozCamp LATAM - Brainstorm Kickoff!
I led a "gamestorm" with an amazing group of contributors last weekend at MozCamp LATAM in Buenos Aires and posed that question. It represented the "Ideation" kickoff of a larger mission here: Here are some of the ideas we came up with!
The Mission: Spread awareness of Persona to 1M people in your local community.

Next Steps
As you can see there were some clever ideas. What do you think? I'll be bothering a lot of you for opinions, to see what feels right, and what would personally drive you to collaborate. If you have an idea, feel free to leave it in the comments.

Introducing IsThereAGiantsGameToday.com

Single serving sites have always been a fascination of mine. You know - the ones that only do one thing really well in the best cases with a twist of humor involved?

Take Mat Honan's clever "Barack Obama is your new bicycle" and "Should I be worried about swine flu?" 

Or the myriad of Mozilla related sites like "Are we we fast/mobile/pretty/slim/small/first yet?   

Simple does one thing well.

That's why when I took a "Intro to HTML" class here at Mozilla I was inspired to use my new-found skills to better mankind, one small problem at a time. 

 (Above: A studious Mary, William, and Laura hard at work. Laura throws out the universal hand-sign for html bracket)

To solve the sort of pint-sized problems that can plague thousands, if not millions of people. 

To answer such profound questions that can make or break someones day...

...questions like: 

Will my CalTrain car be full of drunk people? 

Will I be able to find parking in SOMA tonight?

Will I be able to get into 21st Amendment or [your favorite SOMA restaurant here]?

And more. 

 

That's why I teamed up with the amazing William Reynolds to create a new website: www.isthereagiantsgametoday.com. A San Francisco Giants schedule for the rest of us.

And we're launching today. Check it out! Bookmark it. Fork it. Save it to your phone's homescreen. Share it with your friends! Moreover use it to make your life a little easier those 9 months out of the year when baseball season is "Game On!".

Update: Here's William's technical overview of Is There A Giants Game Today.

Our market insights team rocks

I have to hand it to our Market Insights team, who keeps turning out fantastic competitive analysis like the one I received today:

This weeks marketing insight will focus on yesterday's Chrome Personal Transporter Beta release. Summary below:

On Friday Google launched Chrome for Personal Transporter Beta, as a first step towards making Android the standard method for intergalactic transportation.

The Transporter is based on Chrome v210229 and V89. It does not have personal baggage support, and the lack of Clothing Transport upon atmospheric reentry in particular has been the main negative reaction to its launch among a lot of positive ones. This is also the reason for most of its 1 to 2 star ratings in the Android Market.

An Android Central poll asking "Is a lack of Clothing Transport support a deal-breaker?" has 47% of "Yes" answers and 52% of "No, I Kind of Like it."

Speed, discovery, and universal harmony are its main user propositions, while the Holodeck, User Body Sync, and the Orbitbox are the main promoted features. For developers, Personal Transporter comes with remote dematerialization debugging and boasts interplanetary travel standards compliance and warp drive acceleration.

Branding is persistent in the product on the "New Transport" page. Messaging tone is similar to Chrome on the earth: friendly, familiar, easy-going, and simple-minded. Tagline is "Your turf, away from earth."

Great stuff, guys, keep it up!

Release Channel Redesign

We're Getting Bigger and Better
Over the past 6 months our humble product website has grown significantly due to the launch of four new core products: our Beta and Aurora release channels which come in both desktop and mobile flavors. 

That's 4 more products!

These channels are vitally important; we rely on the bugs reported by users on these front lines to make Firefox better. In return these users get a special build of Firefox where they can enjoy the coolest new features first.

To make sure we created a nice new home for them within mozilla.org/firefox - our main consumer facing website - we've done a ton of work: phase one consisted launching a main channels landing below (picture below) - really - just getting the basics live:

Phase two - just completed - launched the second phase of the channel project meant to provide more of a brand identity. 

We want to make sure we're clearly communicating the difference between the Beta and Aurora builds (screenshot below) while enabling the same download ease we see with our GA browser ("general availability").

The Results

• Better Discoverability: After conducting using testing via www.usertesting.com to measure the before and after we learned that users are better able to find these new products, especially from natural search. 
• We saw through user testing that people now have a clear sense of the differences between the different builds. This was severely lacking before and clarity around this was one of our main goals.
• More robust experience: We went from having one main channel landing page to adding an entirely new section on our site consisting of four distinct landing pages and a redesigned landing page

Next Steps

• We still have a long ways to go adjusting the usability on the /channels page - see Bug 725808 for the gory details!
• User testing made it painfully clear that the post download experience is less than ideal: we don't do a good job communicating to these VIP users how they can provide feedback, or what features are ready to be tested. That will be tackled during Q2. 

What do you think? Are there any more improvements you'd like to see on our site? If so, leave comment away!




  

Mozilla Website SOPA/PIPA Efforts

This morning my alarm went off at 4:30am so I could hop online to help launch Mozilla's anti-SOPA efforts. 

Although the scenarios are of different degrees of significance, I couldn't help but think of a story I once heard about how Steven Garrity, a long-time contributor, launched the original Firefox download page live for the first time early one morning from bed over 8 years ago. 

Once I finally made it into work it was a delight to see our main SOPA landing page on the cover of the New York Times amongst our peers at Wikipedia, Reddit, and more. 

There are many other bits and pieces to our SOPA campaign, but here is a overview of what we did on our main web facing properties. 

Site Blackout

We blacked out our main download landing pages by having them redirect to the SOPA landing page below (www.mozilla.org/sopa). 

That means that everyone wanting to download Firefox today or anyone who came to our main website through the normal front doors saw this page instead. Those numbers are well into the multi-million. We make the "deep" content available since we want people to be able to get support, and upgrade their browser for security reasons.

A few details:

- We launched using redirects that would not harm our SEO efforts by following guidelines from posts like this people put together exactly for this reason. 

-We also chose to keep a way for visitors to download Firefox - you can see it at the bottom of the screenshot above. This was a bit tricky since we didn't want to come across as "commercial" or trying to take advantage of this event to get more downloads but as Alex Fowler so aptly stated we give visitors the download option in order to: "...continue to support our mission, ensure users have access to support, as well as the ability to find and update to safer and securer versions of Firefox." 

Start Page Blackout

Even more significantly we dramatically changed the look and feel of our default "Start" page, meaning, the page you see when you type "about:home" into your browser. 

We made it black. We added relevant info.  We put a censorship slash through the fox. Everyone on the English build of the browser should see this page today if this is their default homepage. Those numbers are in the tens of millions. 

This launch with very Mozilla-esque  - willing participants huddling together in chaos trying to throw something together to make a difference for the future of the web. 

For example: here's the main etherpad we used to draft out our actions.  Nothing short of mayhem!

We'll see what results from these efforts as the day unfolds. 

In the mean-time it's been a very exciting day.

Different By Design

Firefox is a different type of browser. Mozilla is a different type of company. You can see that from our founding story, the way we work, our priorities, our non-profit status and more.

When it comes to marketing at Mozilla - which, hey remember how we're different? -  we call "Engagement" not "Marketing," we think long and hard about how to communicate this difference. 

After all, living and breathing an authentic story is the best way to spread the word about a product and our story is nothing but authentic.

These factors led to the launch of our recent brand campaign. Checkout this smattering of creative and notice its boldness, authenticity, and ability to set us apart from the crowd:

The Web Launch

When it comes to our main user-facing channel -- our website (one of the most viewed sites in the world) here's the creative we launched to get this message across:

And some localized versions... (finals are not this neon of a orange)

The "before" shot (Notice how we hint at, but don't really show our difference):

 
Here's What Happened

With the help of a simple survey we were able to measure the affect this new creative had on overall brand awareness. The shift was significant -- now the majority of all new Firefox users know Firefox is made by a non-profit. 

Before we launched this campaign the opposite was true. We crossed well over the 50% threshold and increased awareness over 20% all without hurting download conversion rate.

Next Steps & Bottom Line

We will continue to do more of this and will roll-out this campaign worldwide. And for now, we know we're on the right track and that aligning our outer 'presentation-layer' with our inner values helps us communicate what matters most to us in a way that resonates with our users.

Mozilla IRC In Haiku Form

Mozilla IRC channels become a desolate place during the holidays; much like the deserted school hallways during winter break. Since I'm working remotely this week I poked around my usual channels to see what folks were up to and came across some interesting exchanges that struck me as worth recording in haiku form.

In their own ways these give a little taste of the ridiculousness, the challenges, the fun, the poetry that can be made of the everyday exchanges within the annals of Mozilla IRC.

Enjoy.

I have been thinking

i have been thinking
of contributing but i've
no clue where to start
   - #WebDev

about:memory

900 tabs! what's
about:memory look like
with that many tabs?
-#FX-Team

" ÷ <--- "

Bumped keyboard ends up
Making a division sign
It was Fligtar. heh.
-#AMO

New Year's Plans

have plans for new years?
Sadly not. I'll probably
be doing homework...
-#Spinzone

Stephen Donner

at the brainstorming
stage right now, but would love to
make this thing happen.
-#QA

I hope you enjoyed. Bonus: submit your own Haiku in the comments! 5-7-5 is all you need to know.

PS: There's a special haiku hiding-out in the stub-installer project we're working on scribed by the amazing, "Happiest Man Alive", Matej Novak, who I hope doesn't mind me posting it here:

Proudly non-profit
Free to innovate for you
And a better Web

 Happy New Year!

Droid Vs. FoxDroid Death Match

The snippet channel allows the Engagement department to rapidly test concepts and questions that arise. 

One such question was what sort of graphic we should be using to represent our Android Mobile product. Hypothesis: the existing brand equity of the Droid logo may do a better job attracting and converting qualified visitors than the generic mobile phone we've been using.

Here's a short recap of what we found - perhaps there are other community sites or companies out there that can apply these learnings as well:

Result:
The pure Droid graphic was the most successful at driving people to the Android store. It worked a full % point over the generic phone graphic, and .3 points above the FoxDroid graphic.

Learnings:

• Clearly signaling platform from the graphic increases amount of qualified traffic at basically no harm to clicks
• Cute FoxDroid received slightly more interest (2.5% more clicks), but slightly less qualified interest; cuteness = clicks and interest, but not always highest quality clicks
• People are probably tired of the original mobile graphic - let's change that up
  

Test: Ran three different graphics below through the snippet channel and measured both clicks and conversion. In this case the "conversion event" was a click the the "Get Firefox for Android" button on /mobile.

Conversion Rates:
Android - 2.3%
FoxDroid - 2.0%
Default Phone - 1.3%

I was a tad surprised since I though the customized FoxDroid would resonate with users the most. Are you surprised? Why or why not?