MOZILLA - Making the Internet Better

The Mozilla community, organization and technology focus on a single goal: making the Internet better for everyone. Since 1998, Mozilla has used a highly transparent, extremely collaborative process that brings together thousands of dedicated volunteers from around the world with a small staff of employees to coordinate the creation of products like the Firefox Web browser.

CHALLENGE- Understanding WHY

Firefox may be the most popular Web browser in the world.

Mozilla knew that approximately 50,000 people each day were downloading Firefox (receiving the full data/file), but not completing installation. What they did not know was WHY.

SOLUTION - Data Plus Insight Driving Decision and Action

Mozilla turned to Kampyle to gain insight into the installation experience to help improve the Firefox user experience and adoption rates.

"Kampyle provides a valuable service, expertise, and reporting interface that we'd prefer not to build in- house. And the value this service has provided during previous initiatives has been off the charts," Ken Kovash, The Numerator at Mozilla Corporation.

For a single day in March 2009, Mozilla shipped a modified version of Firefox with a different installer, allowing users to leave feedback via Kampyle Feedback Forms when canceling.

Approximately 10 percent of abandoning users hit the Kampyle Feedback Form, and about 330 left written feedback.

The Feedback Forms were customized to demonstrate: the common sentiment or feeling of people when canceling; the most frequent types of problems cited; at which steps the most users abandon the Firefox installer; and the feedback breakdown for each of these steps.

RESULTS - Two Million Users a Year Aided

As it turns out, Firefox was losing users for relatively easy-to-fix reasons.

The Kampyle feedback results dashboard clearly showed the key issues. For example, most cancellations occurred at step two of the installer. Drilling down into the data, two obstacles were uncovered: Firefox not exiting/closing cleanly (e.g., a zombie process) and directory location issues for non-admin users.

"This is perhaps the best example we've seen of data plus insight driving decision and action," Ken Kovash, The Numerator at Mozilla Corporation.

With the insight gained from Kampyle, the Firefox product team got to work to solve the newly discovered issues. Once the fixes were in place, Mozilla re-ran the Kampyle feedback mechanism for a 24-hour period. This time the Kampyle dashboard demonstrated that the issues noted above had virtually disappeared.

"Close to two million people will be aided by an improved experience over the next year," Ken Kovash, The Numerator at Mozilla Corporation

Identifying these issues - which were stopping roughly two million people per year from downloading Firefox - not only helped prevent the abandonment of a large number of would-be users, but also contributed to improving the installation experience for everyone.