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
- 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.
