14 DAY TRIAL // About a year ago, Mozilla introduced the Test Pilot add-on. The add-on enables Mozilla to run usage studies and surveys to get direct feedback from the users.
One of the most valuable was the Menu Item Usage Study which resulted in a lot of insight which has been put to good use in the upcoming Firefox 4.
One interesting behavior that surfaced when analyzing the data was the connection between the About menu and the updates entry.
Mozilla found that almost one in five users click on Check for Updates after visiting the About Firefox menu.
"Earlier this year, Test Pilot ran a Menu Item Usage Study to better understand how users interact with the traditional menu bar as Firefox transitions to a more streamlined, single 'application button'," Mozilla's Christopher Jung wrote.
"We also examined the sequence of menu bar actions – specifically looking for common sequences in commands. The strongest connection was between the ‘About Firefox’ and ‘Check for Updates’ menu items; after clicking ‘About Firefox,’ 9% of users click ‘Check for Updates’ within 20 seconds," he revealed.
The logical conclusion, Mozilla says, is that users go to the about menu expecting to see if their Firefox version needs an update.
As such, the team decided to implement a few changes in the latest Firefox builds to make it easier for these users to find the 'update' button.
One of the most obvious was to add a check for updates button to the About window. What's more, if automatic updates are enabled, Firefox should do a check as soon as users open the About window and give them a choice to update if one is available.
The upcoming Firefox 4 Beta 7 will feature the first change, the About window will get an Update button. The automatic update check should be landing in the beta after that.
Mozilla notes that Google Chrome already does this. However, it notes that the conclusions were reached independently and were the result of the study.
What Mozilla doesn't say, but could be a big possibility, is that at least part of the users looking to update from the About box have been using Chrome and expect the update button to be there in Firefox as well.