Last July, the Mozilla Labs team launched Test Pilot into Firefox 4 beta via the Feedback channel. Over the past eight month, with your support, we’ve rolled out several valuable studies and gained many insights that have helped improve Firefox. Meanwhile, our Test Pilot community is growing quickly – 3 million active users milestone! We want to continue delivering the best experience to the millions who help us improve Firefox, so over the past few weeks we’ve been working hard to update the extension with some important new features.

What’s New?

1.Targeted Study Deployment
Often times, we are interested in questions that apply to just a subset of our Test Pilot population; for example, the subset of Windows 7 users, or users with a particular non-default setting. With Targeted Study Deployment, we can now run studies on just the relevant subsets of users. Technically, these studies will be delivered to all Test Pilots, but will only run on profiles that match the pre-defined criteria, for example, computer operating system, Firefox version or preference settings.

2.Random Sample Deployment
Similar to Targeted Study Deployment, Random Sample Deployment gives us the ability to run studies on a random sample of our users. With over 3 million users, our studies can achieve statistical significance without covering the entire population. On the user side, Test Pilot will less frequently interrupt browsing with notifications, since users will no longer receive every study. (We are also working on a solution for those that would like it participate in all Test Pilot Studies.)

3. Stop Switch
This function offers the ability to turn off a study immediately in case there are any critical issues. Fortunately, we’ve yet to encounter any security issues, and we will continue to thoroughly review each study before its release. This Stop Switch feature provides an extra layer of protection on top of our review process.

4. Error Reporting
In the past we’ve relied on the Test Pilot discussion group to discover study or extension bugs. Now when you submit your study data to our server, it will also include a log of any errors that occurred. This will help us to debug and improve the study for the future.

5. UI Bug Fix
We now have also fixed a couple Test Pilot notification window bugs, including the transparent background bug that was discovered by several people. Thanks to Archaeopteryx [:aryx], Eitan Adler, Tim (fmdeveloper), Ryan Dunlop and Alexandr Lookoshkoff for filing the bug and sending us the screenshot!

What’s the next

1. Test Pilot for Mobile
Yes, we will work with Mozilla Mobile team to understand how Firefox on Mobile is used in the near future. It would also be fun to understand how Firefox are used differently between desktop and mobile devices. Try Firefox on your Android phone or Nokia N900 now and we are open to your feedback!

2. 2. Localization underway
Localizing each study for different languages is a goal for this year. We plan to solicit help from the localization and web development teams that localized our Mozilla web sites – if you want to join the effort, please let us know!

This course was conducted by Martin Tomitsch from the Design Lab at the Faculty of Architecture Design and Planning in collaboration with Mozilla Labs. Students enrolled in the Design Computing program and with varied interests and backgrounds, including media & art, interaction design and computer science joined the course.

Course Outline

The course was designed to be shared with the Open Source community at the end. In the 2-month course period, students planed their own user research, explored users goals and current problems, created designs based on these findings and tested their designs using prototypes. It contained three phases:

Phase one: Discovering (unarticulated) user needs
- Conduct field studies with at least 3 users
- Mozilla Guest Lecture: The value of early stage user research in real work
- Mozilla Labs provides the user interview consent form

Phase two: Product design based on identified user needs
- Brainstorm ideas on user needs, create scenarios or storyboards, subsequently develop a meaningful idea into a paper prototype, conduct user testing, revise the concept and create an interactive prototype (using HTML, CSS and JavaScript), continue testing product
- Mozilla Guest Lecture: Applying leading technology in your prototype
- Mozilla mentor on user testing techniques and interactive prototyping

Phase three: Documentation
– Contents will be shared to the public under a Creative Commons license

Designing for Social

While the idea behind the course are to encourage open design and research, the topic for the first case also needed to be open enough for the wider community to be inspired and useful. By talking to several Open Source projects, the wider concept of “social” came up again and again. Luckily, students are familiar with this topic too.

Exploring User Needs

After 12 weeks of hard work, several insightful findings on social behaviors and aspirations were identified by students. Here are some social user persons* that are created by students:

• A popular teen Talisha who likes to be kept ‘in the loop’ on social networking sites and gets frustrated if someone in her group knows something she doesn’t.
• A 17 year old high school girl who grows up in the digital world, does most of her studies and communicates with teachers online.
• A boy called Andy who wants to act differently in different social groups, and sets clear boundaries to separate each group.
• A school girl Gillian who started to procrastinate after spending too much time on social media sites and feels pressured by social invites.
• A college student Marko Knight who uses various social channels to keep up with all kinds of friends and feels the pain of managing too many platforms.
• A 22-year-old girl Jess who uses social media as a main way to share her experience of horse riding and learn from other horse lovers.
• Julia, a 26 year old Web designer who uses social media as a main way to promote her work.
• A 27 year old teacher Rose Tyler who uses social media as a major information resource to prepare her class contents on commerce, geography and economics.
• A 40-year-old mother of two, Catherine Wakeman, who learns how to use social media sites to connect with her kids.
• Henry, a professional architect, who uses social media sites to maintain relationship with clients but feels uncomfortable to know too much about others, including his 19 year old son.
• A Chinese girl Cheng who studies abroad and misses the real human emotional connection that cannot be fully conveyed via online media.

*A user persona is a representation of the goals and behavior of a real group of users. In most cases, personas are synthesized from data collected from interviews with users. They are captured in 1–2 page descriptions that include behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and environment, with a few fictional personal details to make the persona a realistic character.

Brainstorm Ideas

Students then went on to brainstorm solutions for the identified use cases through storyboards, just to highlight a few:

Final Concepts

At the end, students developed the final concept for their solution. Here are videos demonstrations of how their concept work:

• SN Meister by Mark Fonacier and Renato Gaylican
• CAN toolbar by Alan Tran and Ben Alcantara
• ShowBar 1,2 by Benjamin Cha and Jin Zi Ho
• GroupShare by Adriano DiPalma and Morgan Carter
• FaceGROUPS by Betinho (BJ) Soares and Nick Dsouza
• Bounce by Hanley Weng and Nadine Denten
• Smart Wheel by Danielle Yu and Rory McPherson
• Team H by Dale Hurwitz and Tobias Reid
• SharePad by Connie Yan and Kathy Qiu
• Sweets by Catherine Park and Eva Hung
• The Procrastinator by Adrian Yoong and Arthur Jing
• ClickSwitch by Laura Minchella and Roxanne Phan
• Social Cloud by James Dumesny and Selhan Haksoz
• Lexicon by Harry Mann and Stella Kim
• Keep me in Touch by Hyun Jin Celia Kim and Shayon Jiang

A full list of all the amazing work from the participating students, including user research findings, ideas, user testing and final working prototypes is available at the class page.

Taking it forward

Supporting this course is a part of Mozilla Labs’ Open Design and Research initiative. We pilot this initiative by providing guest lectures, introducing the latest Web technologies to interested students and providing interesting projects to the classroom, as well as bringing professional UX practitioners to class with the aim to to expose, highlight and mentor students and their artifacts.

Currently local UX groups, including IXDA Australia, UPA Australia and individual professionals assist this project by giving exposures to students work, providing feedback or organizing related UX events.

• Steve Baty, the Vice President of IxDA and the principal at Meld Studios
• Lisa Herrod, President at Usability Professionals Association, Sydney
• Penny Hagen, Design Strategist at smallfire
• Grant Young, Innovation Strategist at Zumio
• Michelle Gilmore, Co-Director at Neoteny Service Design

As the course is completed, Mozilla Labs is also helping contact Open Source teams that are interested in this domain, share these valuable artifacts with the community and trigger more discussions on user needs and creative solutions.

Since not only the product concepts created in the course are open for any Open Source project to take forward, but also the user research findings are shared with the public, we encourage everyone to join forces creating further discussion and ideas, as well as help transfer any insightful and interesting concepts further into real products.

Get Involved

- Get inspired by students work on the class page of the faculty or follow along with the lecture notes when they become available.
- Contact Martin Tomitsch or Jinghua Zhang to learn more about this course.
- Contact Jinghua Zhang (Jinghua [at] mozilla [dot] com) if you are interested to collaborate on similar student projects with Mozilla Labs.

All Test Pilot studies, resulting insights and aggregated data are shared under Creative Commons licenses for the benefit of the Open Source community. The results have triggered some interesting discussions within the wider community. For example, people did their own analysis of the tab data from our first study as well as use that data to assist other research topics.

When Firefox 4 Beta was released In July 2010, a version of Test Pilot called “Feedback” was included in order to better understand how the browser is used by beta testers. Firefox 4 Beta testers don’t have to download the Test Pilot add-on and still have the choice to submit their data or opt out from a particular study as well as the whole program. Being included in Firefox 4 Beta helped Test Pilot recently cross the 1 million user milestone.

In the last year, we released 12 studies including log studies and surveys. The most recent study is a Firefox 4 Beta UI study, where we learned how people use interface elements through an interactive heatmap; this heatmap also allows us to compare usage patterns with a previously created Firefox 3.6 heatmap.

We couldn’t gain all this knowledge without the help of our Test Pilot participants. They not only contribute their usage data via focused studies, and also share unique use cases to help us design studies better, provide new study ideas, give corresponding UI suggestions, report bugs, and even fix programming syntax errors. We really appreciate all your help!

Moving forward

We accumulate tremendous data sets with Test Pilot that are valuable to the entire Open Source community. In order to share this knowledge with the community, we released the first Mozilla Open Data Analysis Competition. The goal is to encourage people to make sense of data. Please let us know (via email: jinghua[at]mozilla[dot]com) if you are interested to collaborate with us on it.

Get Involved

Besides calling participants for the Data Analysis Competition, we are also looking for people to help us design and implement user studies. If you have an interesting study idea or want to try other research methods on the Test Pilot platform, please submit your proposal or let us know in the discussion forum.

• Tell your friends about Test Pilot!
• Download Firefox 4 Beta to enroll in the Test Pilot crew.
• Check previous and upcoming Test Pilot studies and data analysis.
• Let us know your general feedback on Test Pilot in the discussion forum.
• Join the Mozilla Open Data Analysis Competition!

Mozilla Labs and the Mozilla Metrics Team, together with the growing Mozilla Research initiative, are hosting a Open Data Visualization Competition based on Test Pilot data.

For this competition we’d like to explore creative visual answers to the question: “How do people use Firefox?” For example, visualizations that investigate general usage patterns, reveal interesting user behavior, or explore browser performance. We are looking for compelling visualizations that tell detailed, meaningful and yet easy-to-interpret stories about interesting user activities.

The Data

This competition is based on Mozilla’s own open data program, Test Pilot. Test Pliot is a user research platform that collecting structured user data through Firefox. All data is gathered through pre-defined Test Pilot studies which aim to explore how people use their web browser and the Internet.

Currently, over 1 million Firefox users from all over the world participate in Test Pilot studies. The goal for this platform is to encourage everyone from all skill levels to improve the Web experience by conducting and participating in these studies. Test Pilot study results are made available under open licenses, with the data being anonymized before release. (For more information about the Test Pilot data policy, please check Privacy Policy.)

For this challenge, we will use data from two recent Test Pilot studies:
* A Week in the Life of a Browser – v2
* Firefox 4 Beta Interface – Round 2

Partners and Judges

We are honored to have David Smith from Revolution Analytics partnering with us and serving as a special judge. Members from Mozilla Labs and Mozilla Metrics will form the rest of the judging panel.

Prizes

To recognize the awesome work from participants, some great prizes are at stake:
* Grand prize will be a $300 Amazon gift card
* Two “Best in Class” teams will receive a set of Edward Tufte’s books

We’ll also present all submissions on the Test Pilot website and Mozilla Metrics blog in a special post to highlight your work.

Join the competition!

You can choose any tools you like for your analysis and visualization, including but not limited to: R, Matlab, Protovis, Processing or IBM many eyes. You can participate solo or team up with other people. You are also welcome to enter as many times as you like. If you are interested to join the competition, here are the important dates:

• Nov. 17th: Check the official Competition page on Nov. 17th to download the data
• Dec.5th : Go here to submit your results and enter the competition before Dec.5th.
• Dec. 14th: Winning visualizations will be announced on Dec. 14th.

To facilitate the free exchange of ideas, all visualizations and other contributions you make to this challenge must be contributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.

Please read the official Competition page for more details. Also follow @moztestpilot on Twitter for news and updates.

For this study, we will explore how people perform search through the Firefox browser. We will be collecting aggregate clicks on where search is being accessed: the search box, the awesome bar, context menu or the Firefox home page. Through the data, we may be able to detect certain patterns that help us improve the search interface that works best for most users. Your search interface may have small changes during the study and we will change it back when the study is finished. We will NOT be collecting your actual search queries or results you used or visited.

Test Champion: Jinghua Zhang, User Research, Mozilla Labs.
Test Duration: 7 days, associated with a survey
Test Version: Firefox 4 Beta

Privacy

Security and privacy are priorities for Mozilla, especially when dealing with user data. All Test Pilot privacy settings give users control over their data will remain the same for the Feedback Add-On in Firefox 4 Beta. These include:

• Participants’ data will be transmitted to Mozilla only when they take all of the following actions:
  * Join the Firefox 4 Beta program by downloading the beta with the Feedback Add-On.
  * Submit data when the test is finished. Participants will be able to review all data before choosing whether or not to submit it.

• Test data will be stored anonymously and in aggregate. None of it will be publicly associated with any personally identifiable information.
• Participants can quit a Test Pilot study before they submit any test data.
• Participants can opt-out from all user studies or disable the Feedback Add-On itself at any time. Learn more.

Get Involved!

• If you are testing Firefox 4 Beta, the Feedback Add-On will notify you before the study starts, at which point you can view a detailed study description and choose to opt-out of the study if you wish. For more information on how Test Pilot in Firefox 4 beta works, please see the “How it Will Work” section here .
• If you are not running Firefox 4 Beta, what are you waiting for? We invite you to get on the latest beta to participate in this study. Help test the future of Firefox by downloading the latest Firefox 4 Beta!
• And of course, please share your questions and suggestions in the Test Pilot discussion group or on Twitter.

Since we rolled out the first Test Pilot study last September, many participants have joined the Test Pilot program. With the help of the broader community, participation has grown from 5,000 to over 12,000 submissions to date, completing six integral studies. The Account and Password study, the Tab Switch study, the Menu Item Usage study and the Main Window Usage study have all provided important insights for the Firefox UX and product teams. With Firefox 4 on its way, the Test Pilot team will monitor, analyze and work to better understand the variety of user behaviors and needs resulting from the new user interface and features throughout the complete Firefox 4 beta development cycle.

The Feedback Add-On

Firefox 4 Beta will include an Add-On called “Feedback”, which is a channel that allows users to input free-form comments and join the structured user studies as part of the Test Pilot program. This Feedback Add-On is being customized for use in Firefox 4 Beta – and future betas. With the “Feedback” Add-On (see the tentative UI below) in the yet to be released Firefox 4 Beta, everyone can contribute and make Firefox better.

As always, security and privacy are priorities when Mozilla is dealing with user data. All privacy settings that the Test Pilot program has developed to give users control over their data will remain the same in the Feedback Add-On. These include:

• Participants’ data will be transmitted to Mozilla only when they take all of the following actions:
  * Join the Firefox 4 Beta program by downloading the beta with the Feedback Add-On.
  * Submit data when the test is finished. Participants will be able to review all the data before choosing whether or not to submit it.
• Test data will be stored anonymously and in aggregate. None of it will be publicly associated with any personally identifiable information about the participant.
• Participants can quit a Test Pilot study before they submit any test data.
• Participants can opt-out from all user studies or disable the entire Feedback Add-On at any time. Learn more.

How It Will Work

For people who are unfamiliar with the Test Pilot program,this is how Test Pilot studies will work in the Feedback Add-On for Firefox 4 Beta:

• The first time the Feedback Add-On is run, the user is asked to complete a short, non-personally-identifiable survey in order to better understand the user from a demographic point of view, e.g. technical level, locale, etc.
• The Feedback Add-On will then notify participants before a new study starts. Users will be able to view the detailed study description, e.g. the study goal, what data will be collected, how long the study will last, etc. Users can then choose to opt-out from this study.
• After either a specified amount of time or upon completion of a specific action, the Feedback Add-On will prompt the user for submission. Users will be able to see their test data in a graphical format before they submit it to the Mozilla servers. User can also save and export the test data if they are interested in viewing the raw data.
• All participants will receive a “flight badge” displayed in their Test Pilot profile after they contribute to a study.

Open Research

As with previous Test Pilot studies, all new Firefox 4 Beta studies will be open and conducted with the user’s permission. Here are a some of the questions that we are interested to learn more about in Firefox 4 Beta:

• How do people initiate a new tab? Through the URL bar, history, bookmark or other actions?
• How do people manage their browser preferences?

Data from all studies will be aggregated and made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License to the public. In other words, the only information made public will be statistical information about the Test Pilot community as a whole. No data about any individual user will ever be made public. We encourage people to make creative use of this data, to conduct analysis and to perform research on these download-able data sets.

We are also open for receiving your own study proposals. Please suggest any study topics you’d like to see through the discussion group.

Stay tuned for the coming Firefox 4 Beta and the new Feedback Add-On!

“Last month, Mike Beltzner shared an early product plan for the next
version of Firefox with the Mozilla community and presented our vision
for Firefox 4. A big upgrade coming with Firefox 4 is the new theme
project: creating a new, sleek, and simpler default theme for the
browser. The UX team has been working tirelessly on this – streamlining
and modernizing the user interface, particularly on Windows, given the
aesthetic changes introduced by Vista and Windows 7.
Note: Plans May Change.

Metrics and Test Pilot have been doing what we can to help guide the UX
team as they create an optimized design. A few months ago, Test Pilot
released the Menu Item Usage Study, from which we gained valuable insight into how
users interact with the menu bar. And a few weeks ago, we released the
Main Window Usage Study to capture the remaining major UI elements of the browser,
and provide more data-driven recommendations.

Today, we’d like to present some initial findings from this study. Like
previous Test Pilot studies, the main window study ran for 5 days and
covered Firefox versions 3.5 and up. The sample consists of 9,667 users
who have opted into the Test Pilot program AND opted to submit their data.

We usually display study results in charts and graphs on this blog, but
for this study, we were inspired by the work of principal designer, Alex
Faaborg, and came up with a slightly different kind of visualization.
Back in March, Alex created a heatmap to visualize the menu study data
(his post is also a great example of how the UX team is using Test Pilot data to
inform design decisions). Overlaying the actual UI and putting the data in context
was really useful, so with his help, we expanded on the idea and constructed
this interactive, web-based heatmap for the main window study:

(image links to heatmap)

Currently, the heatmap can display the usage data in two ways. Selecting
‘Used by x% of users’ displays the percentage of users who clicked each
UI element at least one time, and ‘Clicks per user’ is simply the
frequency click count for each item, divided by the number of users in
the sample (we normalize for sample size to make comparisons across the
different subsets more meaningful). The first approach is useful because
it mitigates the effect of outliers, since each person who clicks an
item counts only once, whether they clicked the item 1 time or 25,000
times. The obvious drawback is that this metric fails to capture
intensity of use, which ‘Clicks per user’ does capture.

You can also choose to examine specific subsets within the sample; there
are selectors to display breakdowns by OS and by self-reported
computer/web skill level. Unfortunately, you cannot combine these
subsets yet; that is, while you can look at data for just Windows users
or for just Advanced users, you cannot look at data for the subset of
Advanced, Windows users. Our sample is too small for such sub-setting
right now, but we’ll add this ability as soon as our sample size increases.

Be sure not to miss the table to the right of the heatmap – it lists all
the UI elements in descending order and also outlines the color
spectrum. In addition, if you are viewing data for a subset, the table
will show the differences between the currently selected subset and the
other related subsets to make comparison easy (the differences for the
‘Used by x% of users’ filter are simply one subset minus the other, the
differences for the ‘Clicks per user’ filter are in percentage change).

We’ll discuss results more thoroughly in future blog posts, here are a
few findings that immediately jumped out to us. As always, these
findings apply to our sample of Test Pilot users only, and we realize
this sample is not likely representative of the population of Firefox
users as a whole. Furthermore, its important to remember that usage data
like this is only one part of a rigorous design process, and that it
alone will not dictate any design decisions.

• The Back button is used far more often than any other navigation
  element (by which we mean the Back, Forward, Reload, Stop, and Home
  buttons). 93.1% of study participants used the Back button at least
  once, and on average, each user clicked Back 66.2 times over the 5 days
  - that’s 3x more clicks than the Reload button, 10x more than the Home
  button, and over 30x more than the Forward and Stop buttons!
• Of all items that are not in the Firefox main window by default, the
  New Tab Button (Navigation Toolbar) is the most commonly used, both by %
  of users and frequency count. Looking at click counts, the New Tab
  Button (Navigation Toolbar) is a more popular way to generate new tabs
  than the New Tab Button (Tab Bar) that is located in the tab strip by
  default. The New Tab Button (Navigation Toolbar) is also more often used
  than the default UI elements Bookmark Star and RSS Icon by click count.
• Another conspicuous result is the disparate use of the scroll arrows
  in comparison to the scroll slider. This holds true for both the
  vertical scroll bar and the horizontal scroll bar; while 89% of people
  used the vertical scroll slider, only 21.2% and 16.6% of people used the
  up and down arrows. And although 42.8% of users used the horizontal
  scroll slider, only 2.1% and 0.9% clicked the left and right arrows to
  scroll.

Besides putting the data in a spatial context, another benefit of this
visualization is that it is easy to reuse, update, and improve. We plan
to add more data, more breakdowns, and the ability to synthesize
multiple subsets in the near future. We also want to improve the
robustness of our findings by filtering out certain extensions (e.g.
some users have the Google Toolbar and might be searching through that
channel instead of the integrated search box), and by increasing our
sample size.

In addition, the heatmap will be updated over the course of the Firefox
4 beta program. Hopefully, this visualization will help us understand
how the various UI changes affect user behavior, and ensure that these
design decisions are in fact improving the product for our (beloved)
end-users. Look for these updates soon!

Thanks again to Alex Faaborg, and to all Test Pilot users for opting-in
to provide us with the data. If you’d like to help us understand how
people use Firefox and build a better browser, head over to the Test Pilot website
to learn more and download the add-on. And as always, please feel
free to download the raw data and supplement our analysis with your own!”

Test Pilot 1.0 solves the compatibility issues with Firefox nightly builds and includes a number of bug fixes and improvements to the user interface from TestPilot 1.0 beta. With this release people who are on Firefox 3.7a can also participate in Test Pilot studies.

If you are unfamiliar with Test Pilot — Test Pilot is an open research platform, dedicated to building a common and shared understanding of how people are using the Web and browser features through high-quality structured data. Test Pilot supports Firefox and the open source community in their effort to make better products.

We are looking for Firefox users of all levels of skill and technical knowledge to help Mozilla create a better Web experience. Join the Test Pilot team now!

Get Involved!

• Become a Test Pilot by downloading Test Pilot 1.0!
• Learn more about the Test Pilot privacy policy.
• Check previous and upcoming Test Pilot studies and data analysis.
• Let us know your general feedback on this release in the discussion forum.
• Submit a bug report.

So what’s new? This version includes following updates:

• Security – We’re now more protected against any type of string-injection attacks and against attempts to use Test Pilot as a trojan horse by giving it malicious code to run. Some additional stuff we’re going to put into place on the backend will also help protect us against denial-of-service attacks.
• Export your own data – This version allows every Test Pilot participant to export your own test data as csv files. This new function reflects the recent update on Test Pilot Privacy Policy. Test Pilot participants can now run the analysis on your own behaviors, and we are looking forward to seeing more cool infographics in the near future.
• “Always submit my data” setting – This new setting choice is provided based on requirements of several Test Pilot participants. They would like to have the ability to have their data submitted automatically, rather than manually click to submit it every time when a study ends. This choice is not selected by default in this release; if you want to turn on this setting, please go to Test Pilot Menu, then click Settings, and set it up there.

In addition to these new changes, this version also contains minor interface improvements.

Participate

We are looking for people to help us finding bugs. If you have any feedback, please submit a bug report or let us know in the discussion forum. Also, stay tuned to this blog for posts introducing the final Test Pilot 1.0!

1. Download Test Pilot 1.0 beta to see latest changes.
2. Check previous and upcoming Test Pilot studies and data analysis.
3. Let us know your general feedback on this release in the discussion forum.
4. Submit a bug report.
]]> http://mozillalabs.com/testpilot/2010/06/07/test-pilot-1-0-beta-released/feed/ 0 http://mozillalabs.com/testpilot/2010/04/28/privacy-policy-update/ http://mozillalabs.com/testpilot/2010/04/28/privacy-policy-update/#comments Wed, 28 Apr 2010 23:07:49 +0000 Jinghua Zhang http://9.124 Since the release of the first study last September, we have had quite a few user feedback to ask if they can save their own data after it has been submitted to us:

         “I like the ‘Life of a browser’ test. Interesting stats. I hope much of the stats will stay forever.”

         “Can I get my data somewhere? I also wanted to play with it and visualize it and learn processing.js during the process.”

Currently, all users test data are removed from their devices when it was submitted to us. Mozilla takes user privacy very seriously. Our intention is to provide ways to avoid any potential damage to users private data while we collecting meaningful data for product research. Meanwhile, Mozilla is also an open source community that aims to creates an open, participatory and transparent environment for the community members to grow knowledge. After a long discussion, we decide that if users wish to keep their own data for research interests or as a way to know themselves better, we should be gladly helping them make uses of their own data.

To accommodate this request, while not having data remain indefinitely, we have decided that we will support users to export their data after it is submitted. We will not delete your test data from your computer for 7 days after you submit it. For those who wish to keep your test data, please ensure you save it during this 7-day window.

If you decide not to save the test data after submission, it will be removed from your devices 7 days after the submission. This new “export my data” feature will be released with the Test Pilot 1.0 final version.

What’s New in the Privacy Policy

This change is also reflected in our privacy policy. Here is the new section on retention of data in the Privacy Policy:

“All Test Data will be made anonymous and aggregated, and made available to the general public in the form of aggregate data. These aggregate data do not personally identify any test participants. Test Pilot is designed to remove the Test Data from the local database in your Firefox browser when (1) when you choose to opt out of Test Pilot or the test; (2) 7 days after you choose to submit Test Data to Mozilla, or (3) when you choose not to submit the Test Data when requested at the end of the test. Some users have told us they want to keep their Test Data after submitting it to us. This is why we will not delete it from your browser for 7 days after you submit. For those who wish to keep their Test Data, please ensure you save it during this 7-day window.”

The Test Pilot program may change its policy from time to time upon user requests or the change of our research scope. All changes will always follow our guiding principles:

• You Opt-In.
• You Grant Permission.
• You’re Anonymous.
• You’re in Control.

In order to make people aware of the changes on privacy policy, we also update the session of Policy Changes:

“Mozilla may change this Policy from time to time. Any and all changes will be reflected on this page. When Mozilla changes this Policy in a material way, a notice will be posted on a Mozilla Labs webpage, such as on the TestPilot blog. Substantive changes may also be announced through the standard mechanisms by which Mozilla communicates with its users and community, including Mozilla’s “announce” mailing list and newsgroup. It is your responsibility to ensure that you understand the terms of this Policy. You should periodically check this page for any changes to the current policy.Data collected will be governed by the Policy in effect at the time the data was submitted to Mozilla”

We have also clarified this policy update in the Mozilla:Goverance forum .

Get Involved

As an organization dedicated to the public good, Mozilla treats user privacy and security with the utmost importance.

1. Let us know your feedback on this policy update in our Test Pilot discussion forum.
2. Let us know your general feedback about Test Pilot via Twitter.
3. Download and try out the latest Test Pilot extension if you haven’t.
]]> http://mozillalabs.com/testpilot/2010/04/28/privacy-policy-update/feed/ 0