Make FogBugz Better
When I posted my Makeover Mock-up proposal, the fine folks at Fog Creek asked what would you change about the FogBugz interface and linked to the article here. While I certainly appreciated the link which helped drive interesting feedback to the mock-up, I really liked the fact that Fog Creek was openly encouraging for users like me to openly discuss the pro’s and con’s of their interface.
More recently, I called for Fog Creek to improve communication with their users in regard to requested and up coming features. One product that is often mentioned when this topic comes up is UserVoice.com. In fact, the team at Co-Pilot already makes use of UserVoice.com.
Now, thanks to the fine folks at Arc 90, there is a public forum available for this kind of idea exchange between users and vendors. TheBetterProject.org is a public version of their Idea Management product, Kindling. I beta tested Kindling last year and was impressed with what I saw.
When I saw that Arc 90 had provided this public version of Kindling, I knew exactly what we needed.
http://fogbugz.thebetterproject.org/
I’m going to try to resist the urge to submit the first ideas because I’ve already been rambling on this site for a few months. But I strongly encourage all FogBugz users to hop on over to FogBugz.TheBetterProject.Org, submit your ideas for FogBugz and vote on your favorite feature ideas.
If you are wondering if it is worth the effort, I will remind you that Rich Armstrong and others at Fog Creek have not only been actively monitoring their own discussion forums, but they’ve expanded their efforts to monitor relevant topics at places like StackOverFlow.com, Twitter and this (sometimes) humble blog.
UPDATE: As Michael Pryor notes in a comment below, please don’t expect TheBetterProject.Org to be an official place to get support from FogCreek. Putting an idea on TBP is not the same as submitting an idea to FogCreek via their support forum or direct email. This is NOT an official list of Fog Creek feature requests.
Note: Just to clarify, I am not affiliated with Arc 90, Kindling or TheBetterProject.org. I was a beta tester for Kindling and I occasionally read the Arc 90 blog.
Hi!
Thanks for all your awesome posts. I really enjoy reading them and appreciate all the effort you’ve put into this site.
I do have one request. I don’t know if you are familiar with this story:
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1661-follow-up-on-get-satisfaction-or-else
but the gist (and I agree with it) is that when these sites like uservoice, getsatisfaction and now betterproject have spinoff sites pop up, your support channel gets fragmented and customers can lose. It also makes our work a lot harder (we have to monitor twitter, uservoice, stackoverflow, plus internal fogbugz emails and discussion groups and blogs like yours).
I would really appreciate it if you have the ability (since you created the site) to make it clear to visitors that the only certified way of getting support heard or dealt with is via fogcreek.com (discussion boards or email). That way hopefully we won’t ever run into the situation where people in the future say things like “I’ve been talking to FogCreek about af feature for weeks and they never responded!”
It would make me very sad to see something like that happen considering the amount of effort we put into making our support top notch.
Good point.
I don’t know if there is a feature on TheBetterProject.Org to let users add information like that. In fact, I can’t even find a way to change the description. I would think somebody could put a disclaimer there.
I will submit a request to Arc 90 to put a better disclaimer on the project pages on TBP.
I think TBP doesn’t try to position itself the same way as GetSatisfaction.com, but I understand the problem that some users could have.
Arc 90 responded very quickly and let me edit the description of the FogBugz section of TBP. Hopefully that helps some.