This is part 2 of User Success in 2015. If you haven’t already, read part 1 first!

Mozilla planned things differently this year. All of Mozilla including the Mozilla Corporation and the Mozilla Foundation started back in late October and had the 2015 goals 90%  finished in early December. As the humorous but insightful clich'e goes, “the last 10% is the hardest 90%” which is why the goals weren’t really 100% done until after the Christmas break.

We started with a three year vision and then moved onto the goals.

Behold – here is the User Success three year vision:

We will push the boundaries of what it means to give global community-powered support for a billion users with excellence and personality. We will enable users to help themselves and each other in ways never before seen.

We will surface the issues that product teams need to fix first to stop attrition, because we understand that the best service is no service. As a result, user satisfaction is skyrocketing.

Internally, we will become known as the team that truly understands our growing user base. Externally, we will become seen as thought-leaders in proactive customer care.

Let’s get a little more specific and talk about our specific plans for 2015. First, some assumptions we’re working under:

• Mozilla’s global, cross-product market share will roughly double in size (500M -> 1 Billion)
• The size of the paid staff on my team will remain largely the same (give or take a couple of hundred people – one can always dream)
• Our fantastic volunteer community continues to grow and thrive, aided by our focused community management efforts

With that out of the way, these are the specific things we’re doing in 2015:

1. Help make our products better to increase user happiness

• Increase the accuracy of user insights provided to the org so that product and engineering teams can more easily act on them.
• Get instrumentation in place to define and prioritize Top Attrition Risk issues (issues that are most devastating to user happiness and retention, such as data loss).

2. Help more users by moving our efforts up in the product/user lifecycle

• Self-heal: Don’t wait for users to come to us with problems – when possible, fix known issues automatically in Desktop Firefox!

3. Provide excellent support to all of our products and services

• Increase user satisfaction across our products and services.
• Create feedback mechanisms and stand up support to serve and gain insights about users of new product and service launches.

On “moving our efforts up” in the product/user lifecycle, one analogy I’ve been kicking around in the past is the idea of our team on a football field (note that this comes from someone who isn’t very interested in football!).

Remember the amazing collection of circles-in-circles in part 1 of this blog post series? Now, consider those circles overlaid on a football field.

Maybe this helps illustrate how we think of the impact we have on both our products and our users. The higher up in the field we’re able to deflect issues, the lower the cost and the higher the user satisfaction.

One way of looking at this is to consider the point when a user hits a support website as a point of failure. If the midfield messes up, defense has to deal with it. And if the defense messes up, it’s up to the goalie to recover the situation. The closer you get to the goal, the more costly mistakes become and the less proactive you can be on the field.

To football fans out there, on a scale of 1 to 10, how painfully obvious is it that I know more about user happiness than the green field of chess?

Next up: User Success in 2015 – Part 3: How will we know we nailed it in 2015? (Will update this post with a link once that post is published.)

http://djst.org/2015/03/13/user-success-in-2015-part-2-what-are-we-doing-this-year-2/