How Feature Upvote works

This short demo of Feature Upvote shows the problem we solve, how we solve it, and why we’ve made the design decisions we made.

Transcript

Hey, Steve from Feature Upvote here. Thanks for watching this video. I’m going to demonstrate to you the problem that Feature Upvote solves, how to get started with Feature Upvote and how to customise your feedback board in some simple but powerful ways. So let’s get started.

The problem we solve

First, I want to tell you a bit about the problem we’re trying to solve and our philosophy of how we solve it. If you are overwhelmed with customer feedback coming from different channels and being kept in different places, in Trello and in Slack, and in email, and in Jira and a spreadsheet, then you have the problem that we are trying to solve. We offer one centralised place to keep your customer feedback. A place where customers can optionally add it themselves.

They can vote on the feedback items, and they can even comment on other people’s feedback. Now, as I said, the problem we’re trying to solve involves you being overwhelmed with feedback, so we want to make your life easier, not harder. Therefore, we have tried to keep Feature Upvote as simple as possible to use both for you as the feedback board owner and for your users and customers. This philosophy has guided the decisions we’ve made when designing Feature Upvote.

As we’ve been growing the product and adding more features to it, we’ve always kept asking ourselves, are we making life easier for everyone involved in the feedback process? With that in mind, let’s now create a Feature Upvote account and a feedback board.

Creating your feedback board

Starting here on the Feature Upvote homepage, I just click on “Start free trial”. Now already you’ll see our principle of keeping things simple in the design of the form I’m about to fill in.

To start your free trial, you only need to fill in three form fields that you see in front of you: your email, a password so you can protect access, and the name of the product or project you want feedback on. Everything else is either optional or set to a helpful default setting. So I’m going to create a feedback board for a fictional product, CSV Vortex. I click on create, we wait a moment and believe it or not, that’s all you need to do to get started.

You now have a place where your customers can add suggestions, they can upvote suggestions, and they can comment on other people’s suggestions. Let’s have a look at that board. In keeping with our aim to make your life easier, we’ve put in some default settings here. They work for many of our customers, and hopefully they work for you, but if not, things are easy to change.

We’ve given your board a title, we’ve put in a headline here and we’ve added a couple of sample suggestions to get you started.

Moderating your feedback board

You’ll notice that this suggestion has the title “Moderate me” and it’s fainter than the one below it. That’s because “Moderate me”, this suggestion has the status of awaiting approval. Let me briefly explain this.

When your customers make a suggestion on your feedback, initially it can only be seen by the person who made the suggestion, and by you, the moderator. Until you approve it to be seen by other people, no one else can see it. Now, why we’ve done this is, well, it’s a bit of an unfortunate aspect of the internet. As soon as you put a form filled on a website and make it available on the internet, it starts attracting spam, abuse, trolling, and so on.

So we’ve put a few things in place to minimise this. Much of this system is internal and you’ll never actually see it happening, but part of it also requires you to approve suggestions when they come in. But look, it’s really easy. I just click on the suggestion title here to view it, and then we have a change status dropdown and we just changed it to “Under consideration”.

That’s it. That’s all you need to do to approve submitted suggestions. There are actually a couple of other ways to approve them as well that might work for you depending on your workflow, and you can even bulk or reject in bulk. But for now, I’m just gonna show you this way of doing it.

And now you can see that the suggestion “Moderate me” is the same brightness as the other suggestion. And the status here has changed to “Under consideration”. That means other people can now see the suggestion. They can vote on it and they can comment on it.

Adding suggestions to your feedback board

Let’s add a suggestion to this feedback board. In keeping with our principle of making Feature Upvote as easy as possible for both you and your customers, we’ve made a few design decisions in this form. We’ve made it so that almost everything is optional. The title, the suggestion title has to be filled in.

You’ll see if I don’t have a title, we have this red number here. We only have to have at least one character in the title. The description is optional. We figured if we made it required, you would have some people just write some nonsense text to fill this space.

So we figured, rather than force people to have to do that, let’s leave it optional. You know, the less things that are required, the more likely people are to actually give you feedback. An image can be added, a screenshot or an image from somewhere on the web, again, it’s optional. Name and email have been automatically filled in here because I’m using this as a moderator.

If that wasn’t the case, then Feature Upvote does its best to encourage the browser to auto-fill this information. So let’s post that new suggestion. It was added, and because I’m a moderator, it has been approved automatically.

Voting on behalf on customers

Now, let’s say I got an email just after creating that suggestion from a customer who also asked for the same thing, for PDF export.

What you could do is copy and paste this URL, send it to them, and ask them to vote it up, or you could vote it up for them. To do so, click on the “Voting options” menu, click on “Upvote on behalf of customer”, and here you can put their name and email if you choose, but I’m going to leave this blank for now. And done. We’ve added that vote.

If we go back to the suggestion list, you can see that this has two votes and this is at the top of the list.

Working with statuses and tags

Now let’s pretend we’ve jumped ahead sometime into the future. Let’s say our product team met together and talked about the suggestions we’ve got, and we’ve decided that this suggestion “Add PDF export” is a pretty good suggestion. We’re going to do it, so let’s move it to “Planned”.

And you’ll see now that this tag changed to “Planned”. And from here we can choose to see just the planned suggestions, or those under consideration, for example. Speaking of tags, you can add your own tags. We’ve noticed that amongst our customers, this is a really popular way of creating an ad hoc series of categories.

Maybe PDF export is a version 2 feature, so we’ll create “Version 2” as a tag, and we’re only gonna add this to our desktop version, not our mobile app. So we’ll create a “Desktop” tag. Now when we go to the suggestions list, we’ve got this new tag menu that’s appeared here. You can filter to view suggestions just by specific tags.

You can even just click on the tag to get the same result.

Customising your feedback board

Let’s customise our feedback board. We’ve given you a helpful shortcut here that you can click on to get to the customisation setting. Okay, we can change the name, we can add your logo, let’s change the background color to a dark green.

I want to explain a bit about the customisations we offer to you. Again, we’ve followed the principle of making your life easier, not harder. So we’ve tried to keep the customisations simple and straightforward and optional so that it doesn’t become a major task for you to get the feedback board set up. Let’s add some custom explanation text here, a copyright message.

There are some other options too, but this is enough for now. Oh, and I just wanted to show you the languages. If your customers are primarily using a language other than English, we offer a lot of languages and we add more all the time. By the way, talk to us if your language is not there, and we will make it happen.

Okay, let’s save that board and view are changes. Now we have this darker banner, the text we added is there, your copyright message is here. If you really do want to change everything about the appearance of the board, you can do this by using custom CSS. You will of course, need the help of a web designer to do this.

Some of our customers, especially those in more creative fields, have done some really amazing things by customising the CSS. Now, it’s great that we have this feedback board, but what about putting it in the hands of our users? Simple. Because it’s hosted on our servers, all you need to do is copy and paste this URL, send it to your users, and now they get access to the board.

But this is not a very nice URL. We automatically create this for you when your board’s created, but you can change it. So in settings, let’s go to the “Customise board URL” settings. We’ll create something more in keeping with our board name, csvvortex.featureupvote.com.

You can also use a custom domain name such as feedback.yourcompany.com, and this is available at no extra charge for all our customers. We believe very strongly in letting people be able to keep access to their data and even own the place where it’s hosted. And we really make an effort to ensure that Feature Upvote can be part of your own company board without having to do too much work.

Now we view the live page, you’ll see the URL has changed to csvvortex.featureupvote.com.

Controlling access to your feedback board

A very common question we get is, how do I stop just anyone from seeing the suggestions? How do we ensure that only the people we want to see the feedback board can get access? The easiest way to do this is to make our board private.

To do so we go to the access settings where we see this is currently a public board. Okay, let’s make it a private board. We just have to add a password, and now only people with the password can see the board. While we’re here, there are other access options too, but the shared password approach is by far the simplest for you to get started with.

Let’s make it so that only moderators can add suggestions. Everybody else can comment and vote on them. Now, let’s see what these two changes look. To simulate being a non-moderator, I’ll copy our board URL and go to an incognito window.

And there you see that a password must be entered. It only has to be entered once as long as the user stays on the same device and browser. Notice also that there’s no “Add suggestion” button. That’s because we’ve made it so that only moderators can add suggestions.

However, anybody else can also add comments. But of course you can change these options, these permissions, to whatever works best for you.

Concluding thoughts

That’s all I’m going to show you today in this video. We do have some other ways to improve your board.

You can integrate with Jira or Slack. You can integrate with Microsoft Teams. You can add Single Sign-on (SSO), which is very important for some of our corporate users who only want people within an organisation to be able to see the feedback board. So that’s it for now.

Thank you for watching. I’d love to tell you more about Feature Upvote. If you want to know more, contact us at support@featureupvote.com and we’ll be happy to answer any questions you may have.

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