What I learned from the Firefox Nightly Builds site

A recent discussion about the nightly build site got me thinking about how we’re talking about what we do in a confusing way.

The short version of the story is that nightly.mozilla.org is linking to just Firefox builds. It’s certainly fine having a site devoted to Firefox nightlies, but using the mozilla.org domain creates unnecessary problems.

Equating the words Mozilla and Firefox makes it difficult to understand that Firefox is part of a larger mission—from looking at this site how is someone going to understand that Mozilla is more than just where you download Firefox builds?

Using this domain also sets up the expectation that other projects will be available. Not having other projects feels like an oversight and can even cause tension from parts of the community that feel like this should be available for nightlies for other applications.

If we were limited to one site these might be trade-offs worth making to get Firefox nightlies into more people’s hands, but there’s not only one domain name available. Why not have both nightly.firefox.com and nightly.mozilla.org (mockup of Mozilla nightly page below)?

Changing some domain names is not enough to get people to understand everything about Firefox and Mozilla, but they are part of how we tell our story. From this example it seems we aren’t being as clear as we could be and we’re setting ourselves up for problems that are easily avoidable.

Featured Mozilla-Based Applications for February

People and organizations are doing a lot of interesting things with Mozilla technologies. Here are two of the many Mozilla-based applications available. If you would like to suggest other applications to feature, please leave a comment.

The next version of Eudora under development by Qualcomm is a new, open source email client that joins the Eudora user experience with Thunderbird’s powerful and flexible messaging framework.

GlobalMojo is a new web browser that helps you generate money for your favorite causes simply by browsing the Internet the same way you do every day, and at no cost to you.

Proposed update for the Minefield Start Page

After looking at how to make the Firefox Project page more useful to developers and testers, I wanted to take a pass at updating the Minefield Start Page to see if there were some ways to improve that too.

This draft mockup does a few things:

• Moves the information about testing Minefield higher up on the page so more is above the fold
• Adds a prominent link for people to find out how to get involved with Mozilla beyond testing
• Removes the embedded Hendrix form and uses that space for more information about the QA community and QA tools

Any feedback on this is welcome. I’ll post this to the relevant newsgroups too soon for discussion.

Update: Based on feedback I’ve made some more tweaks. Here’s the newest mockup.

• There is now a Bugzilla feed showing the top 5 most wanted Minefield bugs (not sure if this list exists or not but some sort of Bugzilla feed could go here)
• Added information about localized nightlies and how to get started with the localization community
• Streamlined the text to help keep things readable (it’s crowded but there’s a lot of useful information to provide)

Turning A Hurdle Into An Invitation

The Firefox project page on mozilla.org has information intended to help testers and developers get involved with the community. It needed some love since the information was out of date and not organized all that well (you can see the before version below).

The most interesting part of the page for me was the information about how people could contribute:

Get started today by finding and fixing something. Instructions are not provided here since figuring out how to do all of this can be considered part of the “entry requirements”.

When the community was much smaller these sorts of instructions made more sense, but now there is so much going on that we need to over communicate and be very clear about what people can do and where they can go with any questions.

I think the new version of the page looks nicer and is also more useful—along with the Firefox release and documentation information there’s a link to the Get Involved page and links to our forums and chat server.

If you’re interested in finding more ways to make it easier to bring new people into the community, join us for the next contribute group meeting this Thursday. Meeting information is below:

• Meeting time: Thursday, January 28 at 11:00 pacific
• Dial-in information: 1-800-707-2533, pin: 369, conf: 7600
• Back channel: irc.mozilla.org#siteplanning

Streamlining Our Swag Delivery System

Right now there are three separate stores that sell Mozilla merchandise (and we’ve had as many as four stores recently). This is a problem since someone interested in picking up a Firefox t-shirt has no way of knowing that there’s also several cool laptop skins available at another location.

To help clear this up we’re working on one landing page that will link to all available stores. This will make it easier to see everything that’s available and will allow us to easily add more things people are interested in (does anyone remember Mozilla coffee?)

We’ve started working on a design for this landing page and want your feedback. Does this make finding things easier? Is there anything you would add, change, remove?

Note that this is just a page that links to different stores, so if you want the shirt and laptop skin you still need to order things separately. One possible step we could take to make the experience even better would be to have a single shopping cart that spanned all of the available swag.

In Need Of Grooming

I was happy to have an excuse not to shave in December (although I don’t get around to shaving much even without excuses) but I’m now feeling in need of some grooming. I’ll probably get to fully shorn by way of mutton chops or a wolverine and I’ll add a new picture soon with the results.

Please note that this picture was taken on January 5, so you’ll have to mentally trim things a bit to get an accurate picture of what things looked like at the end of December.

Featured Mozilla-Based Applications for January

People and organizations are doing a lot of interesting things with Mozilla technologies. Here are two of the many Mozilla-based applications available. If you would like to suggest other applications to feature, please leave a comment.

KompoZer is a web authoring system that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing for people who want to create a professional-looking web site without needing to know web coding.

Postbox helps you make the most of your email, offering powerful new ways to find, use, and view email messages and content, organize your work life, and get stuff done.

Namoroka Parks Page Is Live

After a few more tweaks to the previous design, the Namoroka Park page is live. I’m really looking forward to seeing what sort of response people have to this.

Another thing I’m looking forward to is expanding this concept to include other parks and more. David Ascher just posted about using beach names for Thunderbird releases and that fits in well with a program to help the digital commons support physical public commons.

To help think through what an expanded concept might look like, I put together a very basic mock-up showing what sorts of things could be covered. I am definitely not a designer so this isn’t very pretty, but it might be useful for a discussion about where to go next with this.

A couple of notes about the mock-up:

• If this about more than just parks we’ll need a new name that can cover more information. I like the name preserve since it describes protecting wildlife, plants and other natural features. Nothing is finalized though, so let us know what you think.
• I’m using the star graphic from the Get Involved page just as a placeholder. It might make sense to come up with some graphic elements specifically for this program, although it’s probably helpful to have a name before thinking about logos

Getting New People Involved In The Community

In the month since I last posted about the new Getting Involved page, a lot has happened. I’ve been amazed to see the response we’ve had from the contact form—more than 1,500 people have gotten in touch to tell us they want to contribute to Mozilla.

Only a few of those people have contributed so far and we discussed ways to make it easier to get started at a session at the all-hands. There were a lot of good ideas such as improving the way the form works, identifying easy first projects for each community area and being disciplined about maintaining the helpwanted keyword in Bugzilla.

I had a presentation for the session, but my laptop wasn’t able to hook up to the projector. It turned out better that way since we ended up sharing ideas for the whole hour. I wanted to post the slides though, since there is one page with quotes from people that highlight challenges with getting involved that is worth looking at.

The page itself has also evolved in the last month. The content is shifting as we’re seeing what people are contacting us about and as other groups in the community try ideas out. Thanks to Jamey Boye the design has also improved with the addition of a new logo for localization.

I imagine things will continue to evolve as we see what works and what can be done better. If you’d like to get involved with this, comment on this post and I’ll be sure to let you know when the contribute group meets again sometime in January.

Tweaks To Parks Page Design

We’ve made some tweaks to the initial Namoroka Parks page mockup and Jamey Boje has made some banners people can use to link to the new page. Just posting these to get some feedback before we go live with this next week.