Relaunching Mozilla’s Contribute Page: Applying Open By Design for a Better Volunteer Experience
Tl;dr: This week, the Open Innovation team published a redesigned version of the Contribute page at mozilla.org/contribute. This opens up a new and improved way for volunteers to get involved with Mozilla projects and communities.
At Mozilla, we believe in the power of our communities.
Contributors translate our products, answer support questions and make thousands of code contributions a year. Mozilla communities are a critical resource for making the internet a more open, diverse and accessible resource for all.
Over the last few years, we’ve started to look at how these contributors begin with Mozilla. How does someone initially get involved as a volunteer? How do they connect to our projects? Are they contributing to the projects that are ready and able to effectively appreciate their contributions?
Early incremental improvements
The start of the contributor journey has long been a challenge for Mozilla. Since 2015, Open Innovation has been thinking about how the Contribute page could be improved. Teams who were represented on the previous iteration of the page were passionate about what the page represented. They were overwhelmed, however, by the volume of people who wanted to contribute.
In 2016, we launched an experiment that fundamentally changed the purpose of the page. Visitors would be shown a variety of simple or challenging tasks they could participate in. All of the tasks were self-contained (tweet, donate, watch a video) and none of them provided pathways for participation with any Mozilla teams or projects.
Engagement on the page increased as the options for participation became simpler and more accessible. Staff teams were no longer overwhelmed by a deluge of requests from people discovering their projects from the site. But the Contribute page remained imperfect. It felt disconnected from our mission. We were still not being intentional about being open. We weren’t designing for the greatest impact or a rewarding experience.
The goal for the newest version of the page was that it would truly embody the principles of Open by Design.
Everything new: from on boarding to project curation
“Being Open by Design” for us means “developing an understanding of how our products and technologies deliver value within an ecosystem. It means intentionally designing how we work with external collaborators and contributors to optimize that value.”
Often enough “openness by default” reflects an absence of strategic intent. Acting without clarity about why you’re doing something, or what the intended outcomes are, means your commitment to openness is likely to diminish over time. This is what we were seeing in the previous versions of the Contribute page.
The new version of the Contribute page that launched this week is based on extensive research into what page visitors wanted. It builds on the previous experiment with feedback gathered through interviews with users, staff and community members.
“There’s a mission here, a manifesto, so I’d be pretty much interested in a better way of getting involved with Mozilla. As a front end developer this is something I strongly believe in, an open and accessible web.” (usertesting.com quote)
The new page doesn’t send people directly to every Mozilla project. Instead it drives people through highly curated opportunities that are ready for high-volume participation like Support, to pages that thoughtfully onboard new contributors such as Localization, and Coding.
By applying the principles of open by design to the Contribute page we’re taking a more intentional approach to our communities. We hope that this page will encourage new visitors to make their first contribution to Mozilla. We hope that existing Mozillians will feel confident directing friends and family who are interested in learning more about contribution to this page.
And we hope this page helps all of our communities find the information they need to learn, explore, and stay involved with Mozilla.
