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Like the old commercial says, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. With that in mind, David Rolnitzky and I have been working to improve the Firefox first run page with the aim of increasing the post-download user retention rate.

The previous version of the page was light on concrete ‘getting started’ information, so in the new page (which went live a few days ago) we wanted to provide a few quick tips on how to use some popular Firefox features. Our assumption was that if we can educate people on these features early on in their Firefox experience, they’ll be more likely to come back next time.

The big challenge was to provide this info in an easily scannable and non-invasive way so as not to delay people from actually using their new browser. To do this, we’re exposing just one tip at a time – the rest are discoverable through a series of pretty nifty DHTML transitions. We also focused on only four very easily understandable features and tried to keep the copy as short as possible.

This is obviously a crucial page in the Firefox new user experience, so we’re considering this the first in a series of tests. Right now it’s only available in the en-US version, but once we have a better idea of what works we’ll begin the process of localizing it for Firefox users around the world.

A screenshot of one of the panels is below, but I highly recommend viewing the actual live version of the page to get the full effect.

Thanks to Paul Kim, Mike Beltzner, Chris Beard and Jay Patel for their feedback and advice on this page. Big thanks to Alicia Patterson for her design work and Steven Garrity for his DHTML wizardry.

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Every major Firefox update is referred to by a code name during its pre-release period. The names come from major parks around the world…Firefox 1.5 was Deer Park, Firefox 2 was Bon Echo, and Firefox 3 is Gran Paradiso.

Gran Paradiso is well underway, of course, so it’s time to give it a visual identity of its own (for comparison, here’s the Bon Echo identity). The name evokes images of travel from an earlier, more glamorous era so we decided to center our campaign around a vintage travel theme.

The first step was to bring our fictional place called Gran Paradiso to life in the form of a poster by artist Steve Forney. The final art is below (makes Gran Paradiso look like a pretty pleasant place to hang out, if you ask me)…we’ve printed up posters, created desktop wallpaper and are planning other surprises for the next few months.

One really important thing to keep in mind is that this is strictly an internal campaign, meaning it’s purely for the enjoyment of everyone in the Mozilla community who’s working on the Gran Paradiso project. It’s most definitely not intended to be promotional or customer-facing in any way.

So, without further ado, welcome to Gran Paradiso (click for a larger image):

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