Summary
This is the tale of a Mozilla product team that did user research to understand the goals and processes of organizations starkly different than its own, and how the research findings shed light on discomfiting truths about Mozilla’s own ways of working. The story will detail how the team approached learning about large companies in highly-regulated industries and how the takeaways prompted reflection and re-ordering of business-as-usual at Mozilla.
Key Insights
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Enterprise organizations consider browsers critical for business, especially due to reliance on web apps and easy updates.
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Employees in large organizations often must use multiple browsers due to web compatibility and critical tools.
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Information about which web tools work on which browsers is mostly learned informally, not documented or officially communicated.
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Security efforts in enterprise focus largely outside browsers, with browser security managed through policies like group policies.
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Printing and handling PDFs remain vital functions in regulated industries, despite modern assumptions that printing is obsolete.
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Mozilla had minimal analytics or ownership around printing UX, leading to low product prioritization of these core features.
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Exploratory user research can reveal crucial but overlooked needs, challenging teams’ focus on shiny new innovations.
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Historical interaction design research on office machines like copy machines informs current UX understanding of fundamental workflows.
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Mozilla’s flat, decentralized organization presents challenges for cross-team collaboration but also opportunities for new beginnings.
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Millions of Firefox users rely daily on printing and viewing PDFs, showing significant impact of improving these legacy features.
Notable Quotes
"There is at least one donut on every slide. Time to make the donuts."
"Fred, the sleepy eyed baker, was a prominent example of being customer centric before CX was even a thing."
"We went to Minneapolis because of the myriad corporate headquarters located there."
"Browsers are considered absolutely critical to business given the reliance on web apps."
"People learn through word of mouth or trial and error which tools work on which browsers."
"Printing is not sexy but it is absolutely vital."
"The cult of the new and shiny drowns out the quiet call of the well established."
"We lacked basic analytics about PDFs and printing, and no one from UX owned printing."
"About 7% of our daily active users print from the browser, which means about 6 million people worldwide."
"Exploratory user research can serve as a boundary spanning object that facilitates collaboration across teams."
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