I’m writing this post from the center of one of the leading high-tech hubs in the world. As more of our lives migrate online, what happens to those that can’t migrate with us, either because they don’t have access to the Web or because they don’t understand how to use  a computer?  How big will this digital divide grow?

Fortunately, there are ways that you can help.  One way is to participate in Mozilla Service Week (September 14-21), which is open and taking pledges.  Mary has a great write-up about the program, but the quick version is that Mozilla is encouraging anyone with a technical skill or two to share to donate just a little bit of your time.  It can be as simple as teaching someone how to access the Web with Firefox, or as complex as setting up a network for your local community center.

I’m involved with Community Technology Network, which serves as a resource for computer labs and other non-profits to improve digital literacy.  For those that live in the Bay Area, I’d encourage you to get involved with CTN (watch for more details on the Mozilla Service Week website), or one of the other partner organizations.  No matter where you live, the need for digital literacy is high, and Mozilla Service week aims at bringing together teachers and students alike.  If you’re an organization in need of volunteers, please take a moment to sign-up.

Next time you’re online,  think about those that are at risk for being left behind, and then ask yourself what you can do to help.  Start by making a pledge now for Mozilla Service Week.

I’ve been working with the Add-ons crew for a while and I’m really excited to see how consumer friendly and discoverable the site has become.   You can read more about Nick’s great writeup about the new AMO design here, but suffice it to say I think that it’s a big step forward for Add-ons.  Take a look at the homepage screenshots for a quick trip down Add-on memory lane (the AMO site during the Firefox 1, Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 eras) and I think you’ll agree how engaging the new site is for those familiar with add-ons, and how welcoming the experience is for someone who is new to the world of browser customization. Collections has evolved as well after receiving positive feedback last fall when we released the first iteration with Fashion Your Firefox, up until the present, with the full release of Collections.

I tried my first add-on four years ago, and it was a bit of an effort to sift through, with what was then many hundreds of add-ons.  Now with the redesigned site and the launch of Collections, I find myself having a great time exploring the thousands of new Collections of add-ons created in just a day since the program launch.  And (shameless plug alert), you can try out Rolo’s Blue Plate Special, a Collection of some of my favorite add-ons that developers and non-developers can enjoy.  It was really easy to create and fun to discover some new add-ons in the process.

Apps are all the rage these days, yet the Mozilla community has been creating imaginative, useful, and fun add-ons for years, and sharing those favorite add-ons with others through articles, blog posts, and word-of-mouth.  Type in “best Firefox add-ons” into any browser, and you’ll find hundreds of such lists.  Collections takes this social exchange, centers it on the AMO website, and gives users some great tools to allow people to share their favorites and new discoveries.  So get out there sharing and collecting, and tell us what you find!

To celebrate this new speed benchmark, we’ve asked some world record holders to share their special “fast” talent.  My hands hurt just watching the fastest clapper clap in world record time.

You’re encouraged to share in the fun and spread the word about the new speed of Firefox 3.5 by submitting a video of your fastest talent.  From John Slater’s blog:

1. Make a short (30 seconds, max) video of you doing your speediest skill. It doesn’t matter if it’s making a sandwich, changing a tire or mowing your lawn…it just has to be fast.

2. Visit www.fastestfirefox.com and follow the easy instructions on how to upload your video to us.

3. We’ll be editing the best submissions into a compilation video that really shows off what our community is capable of, so check back about a week after the 3.5 release. If we use your clip, you’ll get a Firefox 3.5 t-shirt plus, of course, worldwide fame and the satisfaction of helping the open web.

What you might not know is that on the other end of the line, your support query is often handled by Scandinavian supermodels. Go to SUMO and find common questions like how to import Internet Explorer Favorites from another computer, and you might be fortunate to receive a message from someone like this:

Just one more reason to head over there immediately and learn more tips and tricks.

Making Converts

Most users that visit the Firefox download page that don’t have Firefox arrive with Internet Explorer.  Since IE makes up the majority of visits, we created a page specifically addressing IE users, with information about Firefox vs. IE features, reasons to switch, and of course a prominent download button.  The end result was that over the week-long test period, the test page improved visit-to-download conversion by 0.3% over the incumbent page at a statistically significant level (for you stats geeks out there, that’s at a 99% Confidence Level where z=~4).  To put this in perspective, for the en-US page specifically, that type of improvement would net about a quarter of a million new downloads per year.  More testing is on the way to try and continue to improve this result.  In the meantime, if you visit the Firefox download page and you have Internet Explorer in the US, you’ll get this new “control” page.

Content Just For You, Awesome Firefox User

One of the key insights prior to this test was the discovery that a huge percentage of users that already have Firefox (about 30%!)  end up on the Firefox download page.  From looking at some anonymous click-stream data in conjunction with funnelcake experiments, a large number of these users seem to be confused about how to update their Firefox.  Once again, browser detection to the rescue (or so the theory of the test goes)!

So we presented two more test pages for users that visited with Firefox–one for those with the latest flavor of version 3, and a page for those that visited with a version older than 3.  The first page (we’ll refer to it as the “Upgrade” page), focused on encouraging users to upgrade and prominently featuring tips and tricks.  The second page (we’ll refer to it as the “Get Personal” page), encouraged users with the latest and greatest version of Firefox (good job!) to explore the world of browser customization and get involved with the Mozilla community.

To measure how well these two pages performed against our current page (our well known Firefox download page, a.k.a. the “control”), we used bounce-rate, defined as single page views/entry pages as our main metric.  In other words, compared to the control page, did users see one of these new test pages and indicate an interest in learning more by clicking on links for customization,  tips and tricks, or by upgrading their browser?  Or did they see the page, and with an unsatisfied feeling, “bounce” away somewhere else on the web?

It turns out that presenting visitors with relevant content actually seems to work! The bounce rate for the Upgrade Page bested the control by 4% (the lower the number for bounce rate, the better) and for the personalize page by 18%. In other words, people were more likely to find the information they were looking for with one of the test pages vs. our old friend, the control page.

Since the test concluded, we’ve implemented these test pages (“Upgrade” and “Get Personal”) for the en-US locale.  And we’re already incorporating these pages into the plans for Firefox 3.5 launch based on the findings of this test.  So look for even more relevant content on Mozilla.com in the future.

Probably my favorite improvement to GetPersonas.com is the ability to easily create your very own Persona.  I’m not an expert designer, but I was able to create one in just a few minutes.  Head on over to the demo section, where you can read detailed instructions and about how to dress your Firefox with your own design.  We’ve provided a layered template that you can use to get started.  Just open it up in your favorite graphics editing program (with support for psd files).

There are a bunch of tweaks and improvements in store over the next few weeks.  Please visit the forums and post any feedback there–we’d love to hear from you. As a fan of cycling and the Livestrong Foundation, I’m rocking the Livestrong “Courage” persona.  Which one are you wearing today?

Many of these misleading websites are using Firefox trademarks through paid search advertising in order to acquire leads. With Ken’s help, we recently took a look at the potential damage to a user’s experience as a result of these advertisers. Based on website data provided by Alexa and our own search marketing click-thru rates for branded terms (e.g. “Mozilla Firefox”), we determined that as many as 7 million annual clicks are potentially being diverted to misleading websites. In other words, millions of people are having poor initial experiences with Firefox, or worse yet–paying for it financially.

A new form just launched on Mozilla.com that makes it easy to report Mozilla trademark abuse. Catherine, Harvey, and the Mozilla legal crew along with Alex and our Webdev team did a great job making it easy for anyone to report questionable behavior. As a community focused on keeping the web open and safe, it’s really important that we watch out for the bad guys together. So if you see something out there that looks fishy, please take a minute and fill out the form.

It’s time to talk to our site visitors in a more intelligent way.  Enter a test program that we’re starting soon which dynamically displays content on the Firefox download page based on a visitor’s web browser.  So a user with the latest version of Firefox won’t see information about downloading Firefox (they already have it!) and a user visiting without Firefox will be encouraged to get it. During the test, a sample of the visitors to the download page will see a test page (depending on their browser).

If you fall into the test group and you happen to have Internet Explorer, you’ll see the following (note that there may be a couple minor changes to the pages below before testing rolls-out):

You’ll notice that there is a link to “Switching Tips” to the right of the download button.  In case a user is still not convinced to download Firefox, this page goes into more detail about the reasons to consider a switch:

If you are in the test group and visit with Firefox, you’ll see one of these pages–an “Upgrade” page for users that have a version of Firefox below 3.0 and a “Get Personal” page for users that have a version of Firefox above 3.0.   The idea behind the latter is to showcase all of the ways that users can do more with Firefox–get an add-on, get involved in the community, tell a friend, etc:

In order to determine if we’re successful, we’ll be doing fairly straight-forward A/B testing.  I’ve written about this type of website optimization before,  but the basic mechanics of this test are to run different versions of the download page concurrently, and see which one improves our key metrics.  For the IE page, that means monitoring conversion rate (Firefox downloads/Visitors to the download page) as compared to the current Firefox download page (also known as the “control”).  For the Upgrade and Personalize pages, we’re analyzing the bounce rate of these pages (vs. the control) and the number of visitors that take an action (e.g., exploring add-ons or learning how to get involved with Spread Firefox).

A/B tests aren’t perfect, but they do allow you to measure visitor behavior under real conditions.  Because we get so many visits to the Firefox download page, we have a very high likelihood of statistical significance in a very short period of time.  And, while the pages we’re testing take some large departures from the current Firefox download page in terms of content and layout, they still feeling like they fit under the Mozilla.com site umbrella–important if we make these test pages a permanent part of mozilla.com.  Doing this type of testing can be really impactful.  For example, improving the conversion rate by just a few percentage points can result in incremental gains of millions of new downloads over the course of a year.

Since this is just a test, we’re going to be surfacing these test pages on the en-US site only.  If the test improves conversion or user action, we’ll look to roll out dynamic content in other locales and other pages on Mozilla.com.  Next phases of testing might include pages specific for other browsers beyond Internet Explorer. For example, a page specifically messaging Safari users.  As a side note, we’re not collecting any information here beyond simply detecting what type of browser you have when you visit, in the same way that we make sure you receive the right version of Firefox whether you arrive on the download page with a Mac, a computer running windows or one with Linux.  I’ll report on the results of the test in a future post.