A Quick Mozilla.com Optimization Case Study
As we all know, mozilla.com is a *really* highly visited site. At around 180,000,000 unique visitors per month, even the smallest fixes can have a huge impact, so we’re always looking for ways to optimize.
Here’s a recent example of how the process works:
* a few weeks ago, Ken Kovash pointed out that roughly 10% of the people who don’t complete the install process drop out because of confusion around what a software update is, why they need to upgrade, what will happen to their bookmarks, etc.
* after talking to the Metrics team, Laura Mesa led the process of adding content to the /upgrade and /personal versions of the Firefox download page to address the user concerns (more details about this part on her blog). We also created a new FAQ page with more details.
* our friends at silverorange built the new pages, and our ace WebQA team made sure everything worked properly.
* the SUMO team created new support materials with step-by-step instructions for people who need additional help.
The new content went live today, and we’ll see what kind of difference it makes when Metrics runs the next installer survey this fall. More on our site optimization efforts coming soon…
September 5th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Your link to update _FAQ page_ is broken, remove the second “en-us/”in the path.
Mozilla’s Check for Updates is a fantastic feature, lightweight and reliable. Commercial software “updates” are a hostile joke by comparison: a complete reinstall that makes you reapply settings (QuickTime), tries to sneak in other software (iTunes), leaves old crap around (Adobe and Java), or leaves an update checking process permanently running (Java). Their incompetence makes people suspicious of updaters. Maybe the upgrade FAQ should say “Firefox update doesn’t suck like other ones”