Why have an Ideaboard AND Forum Idea category?

ian9 · 2023-02-16T12:02:23.182Z

I have noticed that Ideaboard isn’t very active so I came to the forum and discovered this Idea Category. Yet neither the category’s introduction nor the Ideaboard tell us the protocol and etiquette of proposing features and ideas that actually get considered.

Please can we have clear instructions a description of your procedures so can conform and ultimately have the best chance of our feature requests being accepted?

Ian Marr (Production Tier)

mikeloc · 2023-02-16T13:13:01.352Z

Sorry, friend, but Bubble doesn’t provide clear direction on anything related to the forum/community (they never really have)… we just kind of figure it out for ourselves.

The idea category in the forum existed long before the ideaboard, so folks are used to posting their ideas in that category. Then, the ideaboard came along, and I’m sure Bubble would rather have folks submitting their ideas to the board. However, like you, most folks have noticed the ideaboard isn’t very active, so people seem to be gravitating to submitting an idea to the board and posting a link to the idea in a new topic in the idea category here in the forum. I’m sure that isn’t what Bubble had in mind, but people are doing what they think gives them the best chance of making their ideas visible so other people will upvote them, and you can’t blame them for doing that because, to your point, Bubble hasn’t provided any direction.

With regard to a feature request being “accepted,” well, that’s not really a thing. You submit your idea to the ideaboard, the forum, or both, and that’s that. It either gets implemented by Bubble or it doesn’t, and the latter is more likely because that’s just reality.

Anyway, this reply probably isn’t what you wanted, but I thought some context might help (or at the very least couldn’t hurt).

Best…
Mike

Edit: look at Bubble providing direction in this thread now… a new day is dawning!

philip2 · 2023-02-16T13:18:53.223Z

1000+ aged community requests/ideas or Opacity settings that break any app with pop ups… lets go for the later. Whether it’s on a board, or in a forum post… it won’t matter! I send my Bubble Ideas by fax to 01234 567891 and I’m confident that this is the best way of Bubble taking note.

artemzheg · 2023-02-16T13:24:31.076Z

In addition to @mikeloc I’d want to share that Ideaboard was updated a month ago:

[Feature update] Ideaboard New features

Hey Everyone! We’ve just released a pretty major overhaul of our ideaboard page. In addition to the new design, you can now comment on and share links to individual ideas. We hope this helps you all rally around the best ideas from the community! Note: you must be logged in to your Bubble account in order to view the ideaboard!

So it seems (haven’t visited ideaboard for a while) that prior to the recent update users were not able to comment on ideas. That’s also why forum has been much more active in terms of ideas sharing and commenting

Also Bubble team hasn’t promoted Idea Board a lot. Top #1 requested feature has 830+ votes, that’s a damn small number. I’m not even sure that a lot of Bubble devs are aware of Idea Board existence.

And yep, we don’t know the criteria of idea acceptance. At least any small feedback or status from the team on posted ideas would be great (“in the backlog”, “TBA”, “denied” with a reason and so on)

sam.morgan · 2023-02-16T15:46:55.872Z

Hey all!

The ideaboard is the best place at this time to submit new feature requests. Our PMs actively triage and browse those requests, and work them into our roadmap.

PMs will leave comments when merging or archiving certain ideas as duplicated, and will also leave comments when an idea has been marked as “Shipped.”

We have a new director of community, @danielzaltsman, and you should be seeing some great changes coming to the forum - our goal is to keep the more official processes off the forum, and leave this as a place for discussion and community engagement.

danielzaltsman · 2023-02-16T16:03:16.935Z

Hi folks,

Daniel from the Bubble team here - here to provide some more constructive information regarding the capturing of user feedback and translating it into product improvement.

The flow of feedback in, and products out, has not been a comprehensive loop in the past. Feedback comes in directly (through support tickets, customer conversations, Ideaboard, forum, etc) and indirectly (social media, review sites, slack/discord communities, etc) and the Bubble team tries to capture it all because of how much we deeply care about the customers’ experience. How is it prioritized and communicated to customers is a combination of art and science and was limited by the team size and resources.

Improvements to the Ideaboard are a small step. The Ideaboard is one place we more formally gather feedback from the userbase. It’s helpful because the ideas are more organized and the community has a chance to weigh in on each idea - via upvotes and, recently added, comments. We encourage folks to engage there, because as the feedback there gets richer, it becomes even more helpful for the team in roadmapping.

We are coming into this year and the future having heard these issues loud and clear and wanting to improve this experience for all of us. User-centricity is one of our core values (Values | Bubble) and Bubble does not exist without that. Our team has grown and one of our focuses this year is to ship more, and more frequently. We want to be shipping big impactful projects but also more of the smaller wins that are impactful for your day-to-day experience as well. As we grow, we continue to invest in harnessing the power of our userbase/community in other ways as well, hence we recently hired a Lead User Researcher. We’re also investing in Community (improving engagement on Forum and social media) and working more closely as a team to address the issues our various customers face every day.

To recap, thank you for the fee as @sam.morgan confirmed - please continue to use the Ideaboard as our team will be investing in that channel more and more throughout the year.

kazimdgoni · 2023-02-16T19:05:56.298Z

This thread inspired me to visit the ideaboard page for the first time. I found it interesting.

I submitted my first idea. And upvoted an idea as well. I will revisit to see if I have any upvotes for my idea🙂

And I would like to have the ideaboard as PWA as like the forum.

ian9 · 2023-02-18T09:41:34.074Z

This is most encouraging! It’s great to see a more focused and coordinated approach.

Based on your reply, I’ll only propose features on the Ideaboard - I trust I’ll see more engagement there as it becomes the primary source of feature request feedback.

I urge you to update the Forum Idea Intro Topic and start actively pushing folk to from this topic to the IdeaBoard.

Note that I have proposed enhancements to the Ideaboard itself in the Ideaboard, see https://bubble.io/ideaboard?idea=1675677715732x758028812543590400

Thanks again for your positive response.