Talk:Support/ForumRedesignPRD
From MozillaWiki
Ideas and discussion:
- Look at Get Satisfaction or Stack overflow -- those are systems designed to answer user questions with a community.
- We want to motivate users to "me too" if their question matches -- we can do that by allowing people to up-vote. Up-voted threads get more attention so if they want a thread started by someone else to get an answer, they should upvote (P1)
- We want to motivate users to start a new thread when their question doesn't match -- we do this by downplaying comments on the original post. We gear the UI towards followup questions (top section) and possible solutions (bottom section) with no obvious space for adding your question to the mix. (P1)
- We want to make it easier to find a matching thread if the current one isn't good -- using tags and a "see these related threads" feature. (P1)
- We want to provide an obvious space to ask followup questions from contributors and keep that distinct from possible solutions (P1)
- We want to let everyone grade solutions (vote up). What may work for one user (even the OP) may not work for someone else, but feedback from every user with the problem is useful in deciding which solutions are best. (P1)
- When a solution exists, make sure the user can see right away without having to scroll. (P2)
- Comments on solutions will allows people to refine steps etc. (P3)
- We want to track who the OP is with cookies as well as by using keyed links in emails. (P1)
- Generally make emails better with things like rich text. (P2)
- We want to let people Tweet or Facebook status solutions they liked with links as a way of giving the helper more recognition and re-enforcing that this is a community effort. (P4)
- We should add a way to flag threads for other "expert" contributors -- but find a way to make sure that's not abused. (P3)
- We can improve contributor workflow by letting they see custom "dashboard" views: Top issues (P1), top unanswered issues (P1), threads that they're active in (P2), threads other people have flagged for them (P3), new issues (P2) -- as well as custom views like certain tags (P3) or OSes or Firefox versions (P3).
- We need to keep metadata accessible and easy to query so we can do things like "top issue by OS" or "top tag by version" (P1)
- Store data per contributor (for future Karma stuff) (P1)
- If a user arrives from an article, the OP should display that article URL.
- P3 if easily possible.
- Email notification system (P1)
- Guided AAQ form (P1)
- Rich text (links, list, bolding etc) editing for posting solutions (P1)
- Ability to upload screenshots (P1)
- Ability to browse questions for not-logged in users (not just a dashboard) (P1)
- Ability to edit and delete your post. (P1)
- Moderator controls -- delete, edit other people's solutions (P1)
- Report solutions as needing moderation (P1)
- Canned strings for solutions/followup questions. (P3)
- If a KB article is renamed, links in the forum should automatically be updated.
Additional ideas by David (need categorization, motivation, and priority) -- comments added by Cww:
- Language auto detection (http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlanguage/)
- When someone posts in a non-English language, an automatic notification could appear notifying the user that he/she will have a greater chance of getting a response if he/she posts in English -- can't we point instead to the appropriate local forum if we know it?
- Cool idea! (P3)
- Ability for contributors to see only questions asked in their own language (P3)
- Auto-translation of non-mother-tongue questions? E.g. if a contributor speaks English and Swedish, and a forum question is asked in French, auto-translate that French question on the fly and allow the contributor to answer in English or Swedish and auto-translate back to French again. Obviously notify contributor of the process and warn about degradation of language.
- P3 -- I really want the en forums working and develop a good workflow and figure out bugs before we sell this to locales. However, we SHOULD make sure that the system is expandable in this direction (P1).
- In the AAQ form, ask for the computer skill level on a scale of 1-x. This can then be used to segment our users ("what's the most common problem for new users of Firefox?") and allow contributors to focus on the type of questions they are most interested in (beginner/advanced).
- A good idea but as it adds another layer to the workflow, P3.
- Look at how Aardvark solved the "Was this helpful?" questions for some inspiration; they provide three responses: Yes; Kind of, but not for me; and No. This sends a clear message to users: a post can be helpful even if it's not solving the problem for yourself. (Added this because of our recent discussion where Cheng didn't want an ability to downvote an answer because people will misuse it and think it's a No if the answer doesn't solve the problem. In this case, "Kind of, but not for me" would be the response in those situations.)
- (P1?) I actually didn't want a downvote because people will whine about perfectly good solutions if it's not the kind of answer they're looking for like "use this extension instead" if they want that feature baked into Firefox or "talk to X third party" I'm not sure how this addresses that but I think it's a good idea anyway. -- P1 because it refines an existing P1.
- Aardvark also allows commenting on answers, which is another thing we discussed. They present each answer on the same page, and then the comments under each answer. For really long discussions under a particular answer, we could use clever overflow with an expander to load the full discussion in its own page.
- (P3 -- I think all commenting on solutions should be P3 since the system will function without it and we can judge the need after it is running)
- Send an e-mail notification immediately when posting a question to thank the user for using the forum and inform about the fact that we're community-based to set the right expectations.
- (P1)
- Send an e-mail reminder to the OP after x days of no response after an answer was provided in the posted thread, to encourage the user to confirm whether the problem was solved or not.
- (P2)
- Automatically close threads with answers that haven't received a confirmation from the OP after y days. (This is going to be necessary if we want to scale forum support and ensure that contributors focus on the active threads with or without responses.)
- Alternately: Digg's way of doing this, "this thread has X upvotes in the past 2 weeks" if it ends up having zero, it's going to naturally fall off the radar.
- Automatically send an e-mail notification after 2-3 days of no answers to give the user a heads up that no one has yet responded to the thread. Inform the user that he/she might have a better chance of getting a response if he/she provides more detailed information.
- Give the user an opportunity to provide more information about the problem. When this info is provided, the thread should be bumped up as if it was newly created and as such more easily discoverable by the community.
- I like the motivation behind this idea -- help people get better answers by having them provide more info -- but I think an alternate way of having the same effect that feels less spammy is a combo of two things:
- 1) Give bonus karma for fixing unanswered threads (This was proposed during the design lunch and is kinda cool)
- 2) For threads that need more info, suggest that a contributor ask followup questions if they can't provide a solution (you get karma for that too!). Maybe even have some "built-in" followup questions so it's easy for a contributor to get the kind of followup needed specifically for the question.
