Test Pilot has been a successful initiative to iteratively prototype new
concepts for Firefox and bring them to users who have chosen to help test
them out. Over 100,000 users have chosen to get access to these new
concepts and help out.
We think we can do more to connect this group of people to Mozilla, and
potentially develop a Test Pilot community. To explore this, we’re going to
follow the Test Pilot method of being hypothesis-driven and highly
iterative.
This means that over the next months we will run a bunch of tests (and
publish the results) to explore our overarching hypothesis:
Some set of Test Pilot users want to get closer to Firefox and Mozilla by
being active members of a Test Pilot community, and this community would
help Mozilla succeed.
We’re still really early in this process, figuring out the experiments we
would want to run and what a Test Pilot community could look like. To begin
this, we’ve started throwing out some “how might we" statements:
- How might we bring concepts from the Test Pilot community into the idea
development funnel? - How might we bring users into various different steps of the product
development process? - How might contributors be able to help with the implementation of
experiments? - How might a contributor drive a new experiment from start to finish?
- How might we attract and retain people who can help do QA and
documentation? - How might we create opportunities for people with UX or research
backgrounds to be involved? - How might we create space in Test Pilot for more concise
micro-interactions (voting, solving smaller design challenges, 1-question
surveys, etc)? - How might we have a following for our findings/work with a regular blog?
- How might we have people from a Test Pilot community contribute in other
ways to Mozilla or Firefox?
Our next steps are to brainstorm and then narrow on a set of well-defined
experiments for the next few months. We’ll be posting regular updates to
Discourse, and invite involvement.
Join us by following the Test Pilot Discourse category or the Test Pilot
wiki page.
Cheers,
Jared Hirsch (Test Pilot)
George Roter (Participation Team)
