You’ve just deployed your shiny new website to a staging server and let your client know it’s up and ready for review. Everyone is excited. You and your team have demolished two cases of Red Bull and sacrificed personal hygiene putting together the microsite for their summer sale campaign. You think it’s great, but you’re expecting feedback. Feedback is nothing to fear; it’s a necessary part of digital development. Nevertheless, it’s squeaky-bum time and you want the process to be as painless as possible. So, how do you effectively capture feedback and funnel it to your team?
If fortune shines upon you
If you’re lucky, you have an awesome client with only one stakeholder who collates feedback from various sources, does an initial round of filtering, structures it coherently with screengrabs and notes, then adds all feedback to a shared workspace for the whole team to see. Perhaps you even conduct a call to go through the feedback, validate the font rendering issue they’re seeing in Firefox, and inform the client of next steps. If this is the case, you have reached project management nirvana.
Congratulations: achievement unlocked.
If you are paying for sins in a previous life
If you’re unlucky, you’ll get 20 emails from five different client stakeholders over five days, all formatted differently and with a tonne of duplication. Someone sent you a Word doc with screenshots pasted into it, but left the written feedback in the email…(this hasn’t just happened to me right?). You probably need to ask each of those five helpful individuals the following questions:
- What browser are you using?
- Are you on a Mac or PC?
- Can you please send me a URL?
- What resolution is your screen?
- Can you send me a screenshot?
Bugherd uses a ‘kanban-style’ task board. The UI is approachable and well-designed.
A better way to bug track
When you find yourself spending more time managing incoming feedback than actually doing anything about it? Enter BugHerd.
BugHerd confidently announce that they are the world’s “simplest bug tracker.” Its sole purpose is to enable both external and internal stakeholders (yourself included) to quickly and easily log visual bugs, browser issues or change requests on a website or web app from within the browser experience, and communicate all required information to the team. If you’ve used the excellent ‘InVision’ before for design reviews, this won’t be unfamiliar territory.
How to set up BugHerd
Step one
Create a project for your site and add your team members. Then add the URL of your site (don’t forget your staging environments).
BugHerd browser extensions
Available on the BugHerd support site
Step two
Next, drop a line of BugHerd’s JavaScript into your site or just get your client and internal team to install the browser extension (Chrome, Firefox and Safari only). The advantage of using the browser extension is that you can attach screenshots to the bugs you or your clients log.
BugHerd’s tools will only be displayed to team members or clients that you’ve added as ‘guests.’ This means you can put the code on a live site and the general public will be none-the-wiser.
Guests don’t need an account. They just need an email invitation with a link.
Clients can use BugHerd as a ‘guest’, meaning there is no need to join another agency tool.
Your team and client will now be able to access BugHerd’s tools. I say tools, but really there’s only one worth worrying about—a big green ‘+’ button. The tools are hidden within a sidebar that is closed on initial page load. This means it doesn’t interfere with the design or functionality of the site.
On initial page load the BugHerd tools are hidden away.
Step three
Submit your feedback. When you’re ready to provide feedback, open the sidebar, click the ‘+’, then click on the part of the webpage you want to record feedback about. Write what you have to say and click submit. That’s it.
No really, that’s it. It’s beautifully simple.
Once the BugHerd sidebar is open, you have the ability to log issues using the ‘+’ button or you can view your issues or those assigned to the wider team.
Logging an issue couldn’t be easier. Just point and click. BugHerd keeps it light and only asks for a little information. It gathers the rest itself.
Once you submit a bug, the system tells you it’s saving. Afterwards, you can see all your feedback logged in the sidebar.
Note: There’s one other way to gather feedback. BugHerd has an option to let you send feedback with a specialized tab. This tab will display in the bottom right of the browser to all users of the site (you’ll need to add the JavaScript to your site for this to work). This lets you gather feedback from the general public. These visitors won’t see any tools or reporting, they can simply submit an issue. It’s basic, but useful.
Reporting issues
The process of reporting issues is breezy, but where the magic really happens is in the data the app collects as a person reviews a web page. In your management interface, you can view:
- All client and public feedback in a ‘feedback’ tab
- Internal feedback in the backlog column of a ‘task board,’ kanban-style
- A screenshot at the time you reported the bug (this feature requires the browser extension)
- All of the technical data your team requires such as operating system, browser, and screen size
- The bug or issue URL. Even better, clicking the URL takes you directly to the page you’re reviewing, and scrolls right to the bugs’ location
You can review client responses in the feedback tab, and if it’s a valid issue, you can move to the task board where you can:
- Assign to a team member
- Mark with a severity and prioritise it accordingly
- Append it with attachments
- Discuss it using comments
In the administration console, you can view information that BugHerd has automatically captured such as browser version, Mac or PC and a screenshot of the issue.
Feedback from clients shows up in the feedback tab. This keeps it away from the team’s workflow until a project manager has validated it.
It’s an easy system to use. The functionality is straightforward and remains focused. The UI is approachable and the colours neutral. It’s not quite as fresh and sharp as, say, Evernote or InVision but it’s certainly nice to look at and easy to use. If I have one gripe about the interface it is the ‘projects’ view, which shows all of your projects accompanied by graphs showing bugs reported vs. bugs fixed. They feel like a gimmick rather than a useful visualization of progress. The graphs are too small, there is no sense of scale and no labelling. BugHerd lacks any real reporting aside from this feature. They could learn a lot from apps like Toggl which have excellent, clear charting of progress.
The Project List view is the nearest thing to a Dashboard that BugHerd has. Information is very limited and this is all the reporting available.
BugHerd comes with a few handy integration options. Basecamp, JIRA and GitHub are just a few apps that integrate seamlessly with it. Integrations are relatively easy to setup and map. My own favourite? Redmine integration. The client and I use a beautiful UI while the developers enjoy the Windows 2000 version of everything synced to their task tracker. Everyone’s happy!
BugHerd integrates with some key 3rd parties such as Basecamp and GitHub.
The good stuff
Here’s a summary of BugHerd’s lovable features:
- Unbelievably simple to use once set up. Point and click at its finest. My experience is that clients love it once they get going. As a DPM, I love how efficiently I can provide feedback to my team and track progress.
- Quick-link shortcuts to view the location of bugs This saved me a considerable amount of time navigating through my site.
- Screengrabs: replicating an issue isn’t always possible. Clarity around what the client sees is a huge help.
- The ability to attach files to issues. Useful if you need to replace a logo or update text.
- You can effectively use your zoom to find bugs that break across browsers.
The bad stuff
And here’s a list of the not-so-pretty features of the app:
- Clients can only see the status of issues they raise on a per-user basis. That means if multiple individuals report issues, they won’t see the bugs their colleagues have raised, leading to potential duplication. Tip: Nominate one person for bug-reporting.
- Bugherd doesn’t seem to particularly like Internet Explorer; a big problem since this is the browser that typically breeds the most bugs.
- The columns on the task board are fixed. You can’t rename them or add more to tailor them to your preferred workflow.
- If your team already uses a task tracker, you may experience some overlap and will need to agree on which app to use.
- There is no reporting or charting feature in the application. You can export a CSV of all bugs, though.
- It’s a visual bug finder only. It doesn’t handle any related accessibility, code, or other non visual bugs.
- Static screenshots mean it can’t help you report an animation or other state based bug.
- You can’t log issues from a smartphone, nor can you review progress.
The BugHerd verdict
BugHerd isn’t the perfect bug tracker, but it’s a huge step in the right direction. Developers like it because they get the technical information they need. Clients like it because they can avoid accounts and logins to the agency’s bug reporting tools, and they aren’t faced with a complex list of fields to populate. Most importantly, us project managers like it because we can easily create feedback, monitor progress, and discuss issues in the app, which saves us precious time.
Bug-reporting is difficult, time-consuming, and often forces you to use ugly developer-focused tools. Impressively, BugHerd actually makes bug finding fun. On the other hand, it’s missing the ability for clients to view the progress of all the bugs their team reports, reliability in Internet Explorer is poor, and there is no reporting, but once these issues are resolved, BugHerd will be pretty hard to squash.
