My Firefox


The First Browser
 Customized
Out Of the Box

Submitted by
Bruno Fleurquin



Findings

As the volunteer - goody-two-shoes - administrator of almost 20 computers (those of my relatives, my friends or my neighbours), I always try to add a nice touch on top of the O.S. and the applications they need most. Such as themes, video codecs, media players, compression tools or system tools. And of course, Firefox is part of that touch.

I always make a point of telling them that, if I were them, I’d rather use Firefox. But I'm not, so they do just as they want. With almost 5 years of hindsight, about half of them tried it and never looked back. And the other half must have tried it and couldn’t get back fast enough to their usual browser. Old habits die hard...

What became clear though, after all these years, was that the more I had tinkered with their Firefox installation, just to try to adjust it to their specific needs and online activities, the more they would stick to using Firefox.

Did I hear you say "big deal"? Big deal indeed: this finding was the starting point of my plan for the Impact Mozilla Challenge!


Two conflicting, irreconcilable trends

The Impact Mozilla Challenge is about improving user retention. Our gut feeling was that in order to improve user retention you have to overcome two conflicting trends. 

First trend: the more you tailor your browser to your liking and to your needs, the more you will feel spoiled and rewarded by the experience. And the harder it will get to ditch the browser and jump back to the one you got used to. Forming and fueling an addiction by arousing the reward system in the brain is a very effective way of promoting user retention.

Second trend: only geeks are prepared to spend any substantial amount of time to tweak their browser. The more Mozilla is trying to reach out to the mainstream population and the less users will be enclined to take the time to customize their browser. Let alone have a clue as to what customization is and how this can be achieved. Joe-Six-Pack might be addicted to his beers; but he will hardly spend any time tweaking out... his browser.   

As a result of this, the more Mozilla is willing to venture into non-geek territories, the tougher it will get to retain the users. Welcome to the wonderful world of the diminishing returns!

Is there a way to come around this situation? We think there is: let them get addicted before they even know it! And in order to do so, let them customize Firefox before they even download it! Let them download Their Firefox, instead of just Firefox!


Firefox is good. But My Firefox is spectacular.

So our plan to better user retention is to get people addicted to the highly rewarding browsing experience that only a customized Firefox can offer them: Firefox is OK. But My Firefox is terrific!

But before we get there, we first need to tell them that it can be done - most of them just don't know - and ask, politely, whether they would like to give it a try.

And before they even try to articulate an answer, we need to let them know that the whole process is a cakewalk, that it will take less than 5 minutes of their life, that it will open a new era in their browsing experience and that they'll only need to go through "the pain" once and for all (provided that they are clever enough to register their profile). So that, in the end, the above mentioned question should end up looking like a rhetorical one.

The download page should therefore be laid out in such a way that it would be impossible for the user to get away with a straight download without having him wondering whether he’s really doing the right thing (see illustration below).



The walk-through process: from Firefox to My Firefox

Our goal is to offer the highest possible customization of Firefox in the shortest possible amount of time.

To be more specific, anything above 5 minutes would seem unreasonable to us and would probably lead to an inacceptable drop-out rate.

Here is a first glance at how the walk-through process to turn Firefox into My Firefox could unfold:
  1. Specifying the target O.S.
  2. Customizing the look
  3. Selecting the scenarios
  4. Configuring the browser
  5. Managing the bookmarks
  6. Register (optional)
  7. Preparing and downloading the installer
  8. Done!

Once the user has agreed to customize Firefox before downloading it, here is the kind of welcome page he would land on...

We are not graphic designers, so he "Fashion Your Firefox" web pages came in handy to illustrate our points: a big thank you to the designers!

Step 1 - Specifying the target O.S.

The default target O.S. will be determined by the detected user agent string.

However, the user should be able to overrule the user agent declaration to change the target O.S.

With respect to the portability, the customization process should be O.S. agnostic. In other words the customization settings made for a given environment should be portable on alternative environments (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux).

But O.S. agnostic doesn’t mean the process should not be O.S. blind. For instance:
For instance a pdf reader add-on is a must on the Mac OS X platform, as apparently Firefox users have been left out in the cold by Adobe while such an add-on would be useless in Windows.

In short, a customized version of Firefox designed with an O.S. in mind should have a matching combination of add-ons for another O.S. but that doesn't mean that the add-ons need be the same. In the event of an incompatibility issue across O.S., the online customization process should let the user know which add-ons and features will go missing and suggest alternatives based on feature parity.



Step 2. Customizing the look

We think that the Fashion Your Firefox app is a very good starting point, especially in terms of GUI and user-friendliness so we are not going to quite reinvent the wheel here either.

However, there are a few things we would definitely do in a different way than Fashion Your Firefox.

1) We would not mingle the possibility to change the look of Firefox with functional scenarios. We would draw a very clear line between customization options that add functionality to the browser and customization options that deals with the way Firefox looks. That’s probably why extensions and themes have different names: they just do different things.

2) We think that only one theme could be selected at a time. Allowing the user to select more than one theme can only be confusing because the browser will only display one theme at a time, and some users will end up wondering how come Their Firefox look only this way as they selected many different themes. Maybe they'll expect Their Firefox to look like a mix of all the themes they selected. Maybe they'll expect Their Firefox to start up with a different look every time. God knows what goes in their minds. But forcing them to delve into their add-ons setting panel to understand that they have to toggle between the different themes they selected totally defeat the purpose or making it easier for them. Plus that really goes against one of our biggest claims: Your Firefox, the first browser customized Out Of the Box (illustration below uses radio button insted of check boxes).

3) We would also put more emphasis on the possibility to use themes that make Firefox look just like other browsers. The more Firefox mimicks the look of competitive browsers, esp. market-prominent browsers such as IE6 or IE7, the more it will help boost Firefox's acceptance among new converts. Using themes to follow a lookalike strategy can only help improve user retention: people won't mind using Firefox if Their Firefox looks just like IE-something!



Step 3 – Selecting the browsing scenarios

Fashion Your Firefox is again a very good starting point. However we would change a few things here too.

Extensions would not be proposed on an individual basis as is currently the case on the Fashion Your Firefox page, even though they are ordered following a typology of browsing behaviors.

On the contrary, and for the sake of simplicity, extensions would be proposed in bundles based on a browsing profile: should a user select one or more browsing profile he can most relate to, all the extensions the profiles include will be installed by default. So that they won't have to go through the process of cherry-picking their extensions and read all the small characters about what does what.

Of course, users will be allowed to delve into each browing scenario to gain more insight as to which extensions are going to be installed and what exactly these extensions will do and unselect them, but only if they want to. The behavior would be mimicking that of advanced program installers where installation options are broken down into parent items and child items and where child items can be accessed through expanding (and collapsing) the parent item.

The browsing scenarios/profiles should also be identified and labelled in such a way that they:

We think that the current incarnation of Fashion Your Firefox still has room for improvement on all of these accounts. For instance why is Fast Video Download in the Shutterbug category and not in the Digital Pack Rat? Digital pack rats would certainly love to be able to store videos they come across on their hard drive wouldn't they? And why actually would the Executive Assistant make more use of Glue than a Social Butterfly?

We also feel that some obvious browsing profiles fell through the cracks. What about parents trying to step up browser security for their children? or what about developers to name just a few castoffs.




Step 4 – Importing bookmarks

Importing bookmarks is part of the usual installation process of Firefox. The question about what Firefox should do about it is asked when Firefox starts for the first time. But the question seems to be a little too IE centric. What about Opera? What about Safari? What about new O.S. installation where all previous favorites have been lost following the oh so dreaded disk failure? What about installing Firefox on a new computer where I.E. favorites are not relevant.

Surely favorites or bookmarks can be exported to an html file on the local hard drive, then copied to a USB key, then copied over on the brand new O.S. partition to be finally imported into the brand new Firefox installation by means of the bookmark manager. But what seems really easy to some people might not be exactly a trite taks for less computer literate ones.

And isn't the goal of our whole process precisely to make customization look like there's nothing more fun and easy in the world? In this regard we think it was part of our duty to introduce the user to the advantage they can take of one very special add-on: Foxmarks. So special in fact, and so convenient, that we felt it deserved to be proposed to all browsing profiles and definitely also deserved to have its own dedicated step in our customization process.

Registering for a Foxmarks account will make it a lot easier for Firefox users to retrieve their sets of bookmarks and will allow them to not rely on a probably seldom occuring best-case situation where IE does have all the relevant up-to-date favorites. Knowing that Foxmarks always keeps an updated set of their bookmarks may even entice users to reinstall Firefox on a new computer, because they would feel that would be the only way for them to retrieve an up-to-date set of their bookmarks. And that could be a huge step in the direction of better user retention too, as for a lot of these non-geek users, bookmarks is the only thing they care about.



Step 5 –  Setting basic Firefox settings

That extending Firefox functionality by means of add-ons, themes, or any kind of extensions would never cross the mind of the average Firefox user is a given.

But the proportion of users who won’t edit their most basic settings such as the home page or the opening of pop-up windows and tabs is staggering. And oddly enough, goes far beyond computer illiterate territories.

Why would tech-savvy people abstain from changing their browser's most basic settings? Maybe they think that the default settings are good enough for them.
 
But is being “good enough” a sure-shot recipe for building an impressive user base? Especially when the market is already saturated with “good enough” alternative browsers with good enough settings, let alone the fact that the dominating ones are embedded right in the O.S.? Hmm, tough question. NOT.

So step 5 aims at improving the overall browsing experience by assisting the user in editing a basic, but important nonetheless, set of Firefox settings such as:
The proposed settings should be cleverly laid out. And make it really easy for the user. For instance, if the user has selected Fast Dial as an add-on, an option should be offered to use Fast Dial as the home page (see illustration below).




Step 6 – The advantages of being a registered user

Step 5 was the last step of the customization process in itself. Step 6 is about presenting the advantages of being a registered user of the website. Of course the user can easily skip the registration process and head right for the next step.

But indeed, being a registered user would bring a lot of advantages. Just from the top of our head, here are a few things registered users could do, as opposed to non-registered ones:



Community building activities

Regarding community building activities the whole breadth of user-generated content could help liven up and enrich the website. Again, from the top of our head:



Step 7 – Preparing the installer

After the user has completed the registration process (or skipped the step altogether), he will land on a page with a message reading that his request is now being processed and that he needs just a little more patience: His Firefox is being prepared!

Beside the message inviting to some patience, we think the page should also sum up the settings he has requested throughout the customization process, sorted by

The page would also display (minimalistically) a spinning wheel to show that some tasks are being completed in the background or (ideally) some ajax-driven interaction between the client browser and the server showing the backing progress in real-time and telling him that such and such a task has just completed.

Maybe a link with a target attribut could also invite the user to visit the website in case the process takes a little more time than expected. 


Step 8 – Done!

When the package is ready, a new page should be displayed in the background giving instructions as to what to do once the installer has been saved on the local hard drive. And the download link in a popup window in the foreground.

The one that is currently being displayed on the mozilla website when the user clicks to download the installer (see following slide) could be a good starting point. Well, sort of...

Not trying to sound petty, but the illustration on the following slide, taken from the current download page, requires a huge leap of faith, especially for computer illiterate people. They will never get the dialog box shown in figure 2 if the only thing they do is “start the process by clicking Save File”. And yes, the page targeted to Mac OS X users has the same glitch...

No wonder in these circumstances that only 57% of the downloaders finally installed Firefox: the 43% remaining are probably still waiting for the dialog box to magically pop up!

Let’s look at the bright side: that means there’s room for improvement on that odd score too...




Feasability

Although we didn’t do exhaustive tests across platforms, in Windows, it looks like extensions just need to be added to the following path within the installer: \nonlocalized\extensions\

Same goes for themes that just need to be added to the following path within the installer \nonlocalized\chrome\

By the way, the installer is just a compressed file using the 7-zip compression tool with some added header files.

In both case when the installer gets launched, these compressed folders get decompressed in the right folder paths and the theme and the extensions get detected by mozilla at start-up. Some other files might also need some editing to make sure that the right theme is used at launch but all the configuration files are text files that can easily be edited in no time.

Browser settings such as the home page or startup page only need to be edited in another text file, namely browserconfig.properties file (and possibly other files, but again, all these files are text files).

All in all the editing process of configuration files and the compression of add-ons doesn't seem to be resource intensive or time-consuming so we think that the whole customization and repackaging process could happen “real-timish” with a spinning wheel or a progress bar indicating that something is happening in the background.

Our opinion is that our plan, on a technical level, is easily feasible. In fact it has already been done before by a company called FrontMotion (Lubbock, TX). The only difference is that the company is not doing it in real-time as users receive an email with a download link to retrieve his customized version of Firefox.

Something will need to be extensively tested though: the path of user retention has been surveyed (see the funnelcacke posts on the Mozilla blog) and has shown that (only) 57% of downloaders successfully installed Firefox and of among those only 49% had been retained as active daily users 30 days later. What needs to be tested is that the 57% must at least be maintained, otherwise what could we do of a higher retention score if only say 40% of downloaders can complete the installation process because of unexpected hic-ups. 60% of 40% is hardly any better than 49% of 57%. In fact that’s worse.        


Measurability

Many straightforward metrics would be at our disposal to measure the success of our plan. In particular following metrics are worth being mentioned:



Budget allocation

Given the rather untypical technical aspects of our plan, and our lack of knowledge of the existing IT ecosystem and available resources, it's rather hard for us to propose a line by line budget allocation.

But a rough estimate of the involved costs, including the designing and development tasks and implementation of the recommended metrics tools, would probably fall in a bracket of $5,000 to $8,000.

So if we base our hypothesis on a maximal budget of $10,000 that means that $2,000 to $5,000 would remain available for a dedicated marketing and PR campaign. A nice, efficient buzz marketing campaign could certainly put this money to good use. More specifically a viral video marketing could come in very handy.

Thinking of it, there would be a lot of funny videos that could be made around the topic of inadequacy. Inadequacy as opposed to customization, something tailored to someone's needs or activities. But we'll leave it at that. For now.



Futures prospects

Eventually, what would be really interesting and a time saver for addicted users of My Firefox, and a very efficient way to further promote user retention would be to design an extension that would take care of tracking every change to the Firefox configuration, in terms of browser settings of course, but also in terms of installed add-ons, installed themes, and what extensions are disabled or enabled and which theme is the active theme.

So that, in the end, when registered users of the customization wizard wants to download another instance of Their Firefox, to install on another computer for example, they wouldn't have to download a months-old or even years-old configuration but a totally updated configuration of Their Firefox, as all the customization settings have been synchronized in the meantime: what browser settings have been changed, what add-ons are installed, what versions of these add-ons, which ones are enabled or active and so on.

The user should also have the possibility to retrieve an older configuration, just in case something went wrong in terms of compatibility with the last saved configuration. Some kind of time machine if you will! And again the beauty of it all would be that the customized version of his dream of Firefox on a given O.S. could be ported to another O.S. in a near transparent fashion for him.

So that if his hard drive gives up the ghost one day, he would be sure, just by signing in to the website, to be able to download and install His Firefox in a snap, and exactly get the same configuration and settings he had the last time he used it. And if he goes from one O.S. to another one, he could be sure that even if everything around His Firefox has changed, at least his Firefox configuration would match that on the old O.S. feature for feature, and setting for setting.

Think of an add-on that would do exactly what Foxmarks does, but not dealing with bookmarks and dealing with everything else instead. Foxmarks plus that new add-on? Now that really sounds like a newby's dream come true.