What do you want in a support forum?
Jason Barnabe (np)
I've been contracted by Mozilla to help with setting up the official
support forums. The current thinking is that unlike on mozillaZine
where the forum is often the initial level of support, the official
support forums will be used as a fall-back for users who can't find
their answer in the official knowledge base.
I'm looking for feedback on what contributors think are the most
important aspects of a support forum are. What would make contributing
easier for you? What do you think would make for a better experience
for end users? What are the things about the mozillaZine forums that
you don't think are present in other forums? Some of the ideas
suggested so far are:
-Letting users and/or contributors mark a question as being answered
so that contributors can know who's still looking for help
-Posting information about the user such as browser version and OS
-Allowing for easy or even automatic linking to KB content for common
terms, like Safe Mode or Profile folder
Using the information you give, I'll put together a priority list for
forum features and hand it off to the developers. Thanks.
Ray Kiddy
> Cross-posted here http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=575426
>
> I've been contracted by Mozilla to help with setting up the official
> support forums. The current thinking is that unlike on mozillaZine
> where the forum is often the initial level of support, the official
> support forums will be used as a fall-back for users who can't find
> their answer in the official knowledge base.
>
> I'm looking for feedback on what contributors think are the most
> important aspects of a support forum are. What would make contributing
> easier for you? What do you think would make for a better experience
> for end users? What are the things about the mozillaZine forums that
> you don't think are present in other forums? Some of the ideas
> suggested so far are:
>
> -Letting users and/or contributors mark a question as being answered
> so that contributors can know who's still looking for help
I think this is extremely important. In an earlier post, I suggested
that every page have a list of the questions it answers. There should
also be a list of questions not answered, suggested by users. It would
be very useful to have a page with a list of all the questions, with
links to the pages or space for explanation if not in a page.
> -Posting information about the user such as browser version and OS
This would be very useful. It is a bother to have to ask users for it after.
> -Allowing for easy or even automatic linking to KB content for common
> terms, like Safe Mode or Profile folder
We should have an 'External References' section. We can also have a
'Other Mozilla References' section. That section could be generated
somewhat automatically, by looking at words or phrases in the content
and building lists of pages on KB or www.m.o or wiki.m.o or wherever.
It could also be added to when people see connections.
Auto-linking in content seems a bit dangerous, especially if we have no
way to track the linkages, or people willing to watch them. Stale links,
IMHO, may do more harm than good. I have seen lots of sites where their
internal links and searching is dumb, and one uses google and it works
better. It does not reflect well on the site.
> Using the information you give, I'll put together a priority list for
> forum features and hand it off to the developers. Thanks.
Thanks for this.
In general, I think it is important to have meta-pages that track
quality issues with sumo pages, such as staleness, user feedback, and
such. If we help make it obvious when there might be quality issues with
the site, people may be more motivated to address those issues.
- ray
David Tenser
> Cross-posted here http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=575426
>
> I've been contracted by Mozilla to help with setting up the official
> support forums. The current thinking is that unlike on mozillaZine
> where the forum is often the initial level of support, the official
> support forums will be used as a fall-back for users who can't find
> their answer in the official knowledge base.
>
> I'm looking for feedback on what contributors think are the most
> important aspects of a support forum are. What would make contributing
> easier for you? What do you think would make for a better experience
> for end users? What are the things about the mozillaZine forums that
> you don't think are present in other forums? Some of the ideas
> suggested so far are:
>
> -Letting users and/or contributors mark a question as being answered
> so that contributors can know who's still looking for help
This would be helpful to both us and the users of the forum, as long as
we do it in a clear way that is not confusing. Maybe a status
field/column with clear labels like "Problem solved".
> -Posting information about the user such as browser version and OS
I'd say as long as it's expandable and not fully visible by default. It
would be nice if the forum presents as little clutter as possible on
first sight and that the interface can scale on demand.
> -Allowing for easy or even automatic linking to KB content for common
> terms, like Safe Mode or Profile folder
Maybe when you write the name of a KB article in brackets, it should
automatically expand to a link with the full article heading text. E.g.
[SafeMode] would expand to <Run Firefox in Safe Mode>.
I could think of at least two more things, as I wrote in the "Forum
manifesto" thread:
* When searching in the KB and the user doesn't find what she's looking
for, there should be a text with e.g. "Couldn't find what you're looking
for? Try <searching the forums>." which would carry over the search
string to the forum search.
* When creating a new forum post, an automatic search for matching posts
should be made in the background based on what the user types, to reduce
the risk of duplicate posts.
* Maybe it would be nice for the user if we could offer the ability to
send any responses to an e-mail address as well? I'm sure many users
want to just post a question without the need to manually monitor a
forum thread (some users might not even be able to find it after posting
it).
David
Jason Barnabe (np)
> In an earlier post, I suggested
> that every page have a list of the questions it answers. There should
> also be a list of questions not answered, suggested by users. It would
> be very useful to have a page with a list of all the questions, with
> links to the pages or space for explanation if not in a page.
I think this is a suggestion for the KB rather than the forums. The
same goes for a few other topics you posted about. I'm looking solely
at the forums at the moment.
> Auto-linking in content seems a bit dangerous, especially if we have no
> way to track the linkages, or people willing to watch them. Stale links,
> IMHO, may do more harm than good. I have seen lots of sites where their
> internal links and searching is dumb, and one uses google and it works
> better. It does not reflect well on the site.
For auto-linking, I'm just thinking very common terms, like Safe Mode.
If our Safe Mode article get stale, we're in trouble.
Jason Barnabe (np)
wrote:
> Cross-posted herehttp://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=575426
I've made a list of features based on feedback I've received at
http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.support.planning/browse_frm/thread/0b8d24094a3c5edd
. This isn't finalized, so feel free to comment on that document or
add any other ideas you may have.