About feature voting, transparency and streamlining

[JonL]

I believe the Idea category needs to evolve.

The Idea category seems to be a junk drawer that will get attention based on random factors that are not known to us customers. I’ve seen great ideas be completely ignored and buried, while others that in my eyes will not make a difference get attention.

Bubble is community driven, that much is clear. Bubble team relies on the forum and its community to provide support to other users. While this is fine given they are a small team it doesn’t come without some caveats. Being the first one: what’s in it for me? And for me this is being able to suggest new features and getting an answer on them.

Coming from a company where first response time is critical I feel disappointed every time I ping any of the bubble team members for an idea and I get the silence treatment. And I do know they are understaffed for these type of things. But I believe it can’t be an excuse any more.

I can do with Bubble missing a feature or having bugs from time to time. But I can’t live without an answer. It’s just not good for anyone.

I’m not saying all my feature requests or ideas are top-class. Pretty sure I’ve said some dumb things or proposed stupid features that don’t have a public or are already being considered. I just want to know how stupid or brilliant my idea is and if it has space within Bubble. Because right now I only get a bunch of likes and no answer. So I really don’t know if I should keep bumping the post(which I don’t like) until I get an answer or just spend my time on other things. If someone spams an idea until it gets attention he risks getting muted or getting his idea ignored even if it’s a good one.

Can we implement a system that streamlines feature requests, adds further transparency and provides a better voice to the Bubble community?

So my “Idea”, hoping that this post doesn’t get yet again buried in this category, is to implement a system where users can vote on ideas and Bubble staff can let us know if they will implement(sponsored or not), they will think about it or they won’t build.

First software I though about was “Uservoice” as I’ve used it in the pass, but this would break a bit the community by adding an external service and it has a price tag attached. Bubble building this feature seems out of the question given that they have better things to do.

So I checked Discourse plugins and there is an official plugin for this.

Discourse Voting

Users can vote on ideas or feature requests and admins can tag the post as built, planned, not going to happen, thinking about it.

@emmanuel @josh @Bubble

Can we get this?

[josh]

Can’t speak for the rest of the team but I usually quickly skim most posts I’m tagged in. I get tagged a lot, and get a ton of emails + DMs, so I usually don’t reply even when I do have things I’d say in response. But I generally register it at the back of my mind and sometimes we make decisions based on forum posts we read six months ago and never replied to. So it’s not a total black hole. I generally chime in on things where I feel like the answer is something that’s an important topic to the community at large and where I can add meaningfully to the conversation. I’ve seen a lot of posts from you in particular where you’re suggesting an idea that’s interesting / kind of cool, but wouldn’t work in the Bubble context for technical reasons that would take five paragraphs to explain, or that I’d be interested in building some day but don’t want to devote team resources to in the foreseeable future, so I do usually skip replying those, unfortunately – I do hear them though.

I’m not adverse to something that helps organize community sentiment, but I’m actually not sure as a team we’re missing key topics… those tend to come up repeatedly on the forum and on support@bubble.is (we get a ton of emails that you guys probably don’t see), so I’m not sure there are big things out there that the community cares about that we don’t know are a thing. That said if there’s topics that you or others feel come up repeatedly and have a lot of community support, but that no one from Bubble has said something about, feel free to post on this thread.

[JonL]

Additionally, if I were a plugin developer I would love to see what is popular but has been rejected by Bubble to see if it makes sense to provide a solution/workaround in that area. Or what is being built or considered by the team to make sure I don’t develop a plugin that provides a feature that is later added to Bubble Core.

I still believe that having a voting option would help streamline and bring attention where it’s needed. Having things in the back of the head doesn’t seem like an optimal approach.

It may also help you guys by decreasing(big assumption) the amount of posts you are tagged in to ask about a feature.

I see more advantages than disadvantages. And there a few disadvantages of course.

[JohnMark]

Like having color for important actions and numbering them so it get easier to track in the log report

[Kfawcett]

Another software manufacturer that I work with does something like this. They have an “Idea” section and based on the amount of votes from the community, it goes to the product review team for consideration. Once they’re reviewed, they will mark them as Active, On Roadmap, Delivered, Declined, etc…

[mike_verbruggen]

I was reading this topic earlier today. And now I was reading a New York Times interview Emmanuel and Josh from 2014 which ended with the following paragraph

To help direct Bubble’s evolution, the platform has incorporated a Features Lab where users can request a new feature and other users can vote on it. “Ten users asking for something is serious enough for us,” Mr. Straschnov said. “It’s not a hard rule, though. We’re also looking at who is asking for it. If it’s five of our most serious or biggest clients that want something, then we’ll build it.”

Anyhow. It would be great if we can create a workflow for feedback and ideas which is clear for the users and not consume to much time from the Bubble Team.

Perhaps the plug-in “Discourse Voting” mentioned in this thread is something to try.