Friday and Saturday, I and a few others were at the BlogHer ’10 conference in New York to promote Firefox Add-ons to more than a thousand bloggers in attendance. I had a great time and think our presence there was very effective.

This is the second event I’ve been to where we’ve focused on getting the word out about add-ons to consumers, the first being last year’s Renegade Craft Fair in San Francisco. Almost all of my time is spent talking with developers and other technical people, so getting the chance to talk to real people who use Firefox and add-ons is fun and educational. I get to learn about things that aren’t obvious to normal users and the problems they encounter.

I spent both days of the conference in our hospitality suite answering questions, telling people about Firefox, add-ons, and Personas, promoting the new BlogHer Toolbar, and showing off Firefox 4 features. Our suite was packed with bloggers all day both days; I’d estimate we saw at least 600 people come through, most of whom we had personal conversations with.

We were heavily promoting Rock Your Firefox, so sticking with its retro theme, we had lava lamps, disco lights, retro candy, 80s music, and cupcakes. Many attendees came back the second day and told us we had the best suite at the conference.

While talking with visitors to our suite, I was pleased to hear that the vast majority said they exclusively use Firefox, and many even said they use add-ons. Those who filled out our survey confirmed this, with 90% of participants saying they use Firefox and 65% of those people using add-ons. For folks who said they didn’t use add-ons, I demoed a few blogger-friendly add-ons from the BlogHer Collection and many people said they’d check them out as soon as they got home.

I answered a number of interesting questions from current Firefox users — everything from choosing where downloads are saved to managing 50 tabs (answer: Tab Candy demo) to what red pandas have to do with Firefox. Despite the good vibe in the room, one of the most common questions I heard was “why does Firefox crash so much?” from users who said they were on the latest version. We tried to give these users tips on debugging and reporting crashes, but it was disappointing to hear firsthand about the frequent crashes that some people experience. I’m hopeful that our continued efforts at reducing crashes will have a noticeable impact on these users soon.

Nick and Julie suggested the topic for my talk a couple months ago and I knew I’d have fun working on it, as it’s really important to me that the add-ons people make are enjoyable. A single bad experience with an add-on can turn someone off to the idea of customizing their browser for a long time, but a great experience with an add-on can have the opposite effect.

I came up with a series of tips and guidelines broken into 3 areas for this talk:

Building – creating an add-on with a great user experience

1. Clean first-run experience
2. Don’t clutter the UI
3. Earn and keep your users’ trust
4. Stay current with the platform
5. Smooth performance
6. Be delightful!

Marketing – getting people to download your add-on once it’s made

1. Choose a descriptive name
2. Have a relevant (and pretty!) icon
3. Upload and update screenshots
4. Avoid EULAs

Listening – communicating with your users and incorporating their feedback

1. Provide support
2. Monitor user reviews
3. Utilize tools provided

The full video of my 30 minute talk is below in Ogg format, or you can view it on Vimeo. You can also view my slides on SlideShare or download the .pdf or the .pdf with my notes.

Let me know what you think!

And thanks to Alex Woodbury for the illustrations used in my presentation.

I can’t bear to type out all of the details, but I was supposed to arrive in San Jose at 8:12pm on Wednesday and instead arrived in San Francisco at 6:30am on Thursday, after which I immediately had to attend Add-on-Con without sleeping.

A breakdown of the trip:

• Hours waiting in airport: 6.5
• Hours waiting in airplane on ground: 6.5
• Hours actually flying: 4.75
• Hours of sleep on the plane: 2

And to top it off, the same snow that made my trip miserable on Wednesday brought fun and joy to everyone back home in Baton Rouge.

This week I’m in Whistler, British Columbia, Canada for the Mozilla Firefox Summit – a gathering of 300-400 of the contributors to Firefox 3. Whistler is outside of Vancouver and the trip is about 3 hours on the Sea to Sky Highway, a winding mountain road with beautiful sites and lots of construction in preparation for the upcoming Winter Olympics in Vancouver and Whistler.

Last night around 11:00pm there was a rockslide on this road that left boulders the size of houses that will have to be cleared by dynamite and will take days. The only other way out of Whistler, besides helicopter and floatplane, is a 6-8 hour trip the other way around the mountain. I leave at 11pm Friday night, so not sure what the plan is for getting 400 people out yet.

Having lots of fun and will post a more detailed update on that later.

The event had a lot of traffic of people coming in and out throughout the day (especially when there was free pizza). The event leaders did a great job of promoting the event in the newspaper, signs, and word of mouth. Everyone we met seemed to already know about and love Firefox, but our main purpose in being there was getting more people involved in the community.

Mark and I were treated to a stormy surprise when leaving UNC and heading to the airport that resulted in me having wet pets for several hours and owning a UNC umbrella that I will never be able to use again (at least not in Baton Rouge… or Louisiana).

On Saturday, July 21, most of the interns took a trip to San Francisco to tour Alcatraz Island, followed by dinner in Chinatown. Pictures.

July 24 – 27 I was in Portland, Oregon for the annual O’Reilly Open Source Convention, where Mozilla was a sponsor and had a very large presence. Anywhere I went, people would start talking to me about how much they love Firefox. I had a great time meeting so many people.

The Friday that I got back, a few of us went mini-golfing (it turns out “putt putt” is not used around here). Then that Sunday, we took a trip to San Francisco and walked along Haight Street and explored Buena Vista Park to the top. We then passed through Golden Gate Park to Union Square. After that, we stopped by Coit Tower, Aquarium of the Bay, and Pier 39 before heading home. Andrew got some pictures of the sights and us.

There’s a lot planned for this week – Tuesday is the intern BBQ; Wednesday is the going away party for several of the interns (which I will unfortunately miss due to previous plans to see Avenue Q that night); Thursday is the San Francisco Giants game that we’ll be attending; and it seems like there’s something on Friday and Saturday that I can’t remember.

Last week at work was a big one for me, but I’ll talk about that in my next post soon.

Photos and video from the trip so far are up. I’ll be heading home tomorrow evening.

I’d like to give a huge thanks to the folks from Mozilla Japan who did an amazing job of organizing the event today with over 160 people attending and still managed to help us get around the city the last few days. I had a wonderful time and learned a lot about the Firefox and add-on community in this part of the world.

I would like to take this opportunity to say that there was someone that looks exactly like me roaming around today and that any pictures you see are probably of him, not me.

After the Remora meeting, shaver drove sancus and I back to the hotel where I caught the bus for the 40 minute ride to Foreign Cinema in San Francisco. It was a pretty interesting experience. It was a stand-while-waiters-bring-trays-of-stuff-around-to-you type event. When they closed around 11pm, we went to another bar next door and when that one closed, I took the bus to the hotel but others went to still another bar.

Friday morning started at 10am with a bus ride to San Jose to see the new James Bond movie, Casino Royale. It was my first James Bond movie, and I liked it. We rented out the theater. After that, we went to Gordon Biersch for lunch and then had a scavenger hunt in San Jose. It was surprisingly fun and took 2 hours and I learned far more about how to get around downtown San Jose that I’d ever wanted to know. I thought we did really well but we didn’t win.

After that, Mike Beltzner drove shaver and I back to MoCo where I snacked and watch shaver dissect his blackberry that fell into the fountain when he was looking for a 1971 penny. When the bus got there, we had an extremely short closing session and then beltzner drove sancus and I to pavlov’s house where others later joined us and we had an excellent dinner. We played Lego Star Wars on XBOX… it was so fun I think I’m actually going get it and add it to the list of things I don’t have time for.

Around 12:30am, shaver drove us back to the hotel. The car service is picking me up at 5:30am for my 7:00am flight. I should arrive in Baton Rouge around 4pm (and really tired, as I probably won’t sleep tonight).

Final photos added to the gallery.

After that meeting, we went to a sports bar in Los Gatos for dinner and casino stuffs. Dinner was surprisingly good, and I met more people, including an interesting conversation with a Songbird developer. After a few hours there, we came back to the hotel.

Today (Thursday) I attended Automated Testing, Mozilla Labs, Building the Mozilla Community, and the Firefox 3 Planning sessions. (I’m still in Firefox 3 planning.) After this, we have another Remora meeting and then will be going to San Francisco for dinner at Foreign Cinema for the Firefox 2 gala dinner thing.

I added some more pictures to the gallery.