14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla Labs has announced that the Test Pilot add-on is now used by 1 million people. This surge in new users happened after it was included in Firefox 4 Beta by default, but it does show that Firefox users are eager to help out Mozilla and provide feedback.
"It was just four months ago when we reported that 170,000 Firefox users joined Test Pilot, our open user research platform," Mozilla Labs' Jinghua Zhang, who handles Test Pilot, announced.
"Today, we are happy to announce that more than 1 million Firefox users are active Test Pilots, and the community continues to grow," she added.
Test Pilot was launched more than a year ago as a means for the Mozilla team to get feedback and do usability or behavior studies. The data would help the design team and the developers know what the users wanted and how the various components and elements worked in the real world.
For the Firefox 4 Beta, Test Pilot was adapted and transformed into the Feedback button enabled by default. This allowed users to share their thoughts, likes and dislikes directly with the developers.
It also enabled Mozilla to run tests such as the Firefox 4 Beta UI study, the most recent. The data gathered in this study was used to create the Firefox 4 UI heatmap to compare it with the previous one for Firefox 3.6. This data is especially useful since Firefox 4's UI is probably the biggest upgrade to date.
Mozilla took steps to ensure that the users are in control of their data. All the studies are opt-in and the users can choose to send the data or not after the studies are completed.
What's more, Mozilla is releasing the anonymized and aggregated data under a Creative Commons license to encourage independent researchers to analyze it. In fact, Mozilla is even running a competition to uncover interesting usage patterns and insight the released data might provide.