Firefox Support Sprint / SUMO Project

Design & development of a reviews management platform

Year

2018

Client

Mozilla

Services

Design

Development

Project

Mozilla, the organization behind the popular Firefox browser, identified an interesting challenge regarding the distribution of Firefox for Android: many Play Store users face challenges of a technical nature during installation or use of the popular web browser. Instead of directing their issues to the official Mozilla support channels, they communicate their problems by leaving reviews on Play Store, usually never getting a response. Is it possible to use the power of the considerable Mozilla volunteer community to give quality responses to all these reviews, offering quality support to all Firefox users worldwide?

SUMO (Support Users Mozilla) Project is an experiment that aims to effectively involve volunteers to respond to reviews of a technical support nature. We are very proud that Mozilla confided in Point Blank for the design and development of this project.

Description of the platform

The SUMO Project is fed with low-score reviews from the Play Store, that refer to issues of a technical support nature. Volunteers log into the system, choose the languages they can respond to and then are presented with the available unanswered reviews. Each volunteer works on a single review at a time, submitting an appropriate response.

Platform description

To ensure quality responses for the reviews, each submitted response must be moderated by three more volunteers.

Platform description

The volunteers are tasked with reading the original response and then moderate it on three criteria:

Is the tone positive?
Is the issue being addressed?
Is the response personalised?

All responses that meet the minimum moderation score are approved and propagated for upload to the Play Store. Any answers that do not meet the minimum score are rejected, and the issue becomes available to be answered by a different volunteer.

The Firefox Support Sprint initiative

The SUMO Project experiment lasted from June 2-9, 2018. During this period, dozens of events across the world invited volunteers to respond and moderate responses, aiming to support the global Firefox users community. The results of the action would then be evaluated by Mozilla, both on quantitative as well as qualitative terms. Can the volunteer community guarantee quality responses by sharing the responsibility with the volunteers?

Design

The application wireframes as well as the review moderation workflow was given to us by Mozilla. On a visual level, we used the new Mozilla brand identity and combined it with elements from Material Design.