Listening to your customers, testers, and peers can make the difference between shipping the next killer release or shipping a dud. The Issue Collector in Jira 5.1+ brings developers closer to end user feedback.

Getting the details right is the difference between something that delights, and something customers tolerate. – Jeff Atwood

The Jira Issue Collector lets you easily create feedback forms that you can embed in any web site or web application. The feedback provided by your customers or users goes straight into Jira in the project you specify, so your team can act on that feedback.

Why you need to capture feedback

The best way to make great products is to get something in front of your users, solicit feedback and listen, then iterate. The ‘solicit feedback and listen’ part tends to get complex, especially at a growing organization. At best, feedback gets misinterpreted in a game of telephone – at worst, developers don’t see feedback at all.

The worst part about this is that if you aren’t providing an easy way to capture feedback now, the few pieces of input you get are from Fanboys and Haters.

  • Fanboys don’t mind jumping through hoops
  • Haters are negative regardless of the product quality or usefulness

Outlier users like Fanboys and Haters don’t always focus on the important elements of a product. You want feedback from the majority of your users instead of the outliers.

Why does speed matter?

Getting early feedback from the users of your software is imperative for raising the quality bar. Your users are smart people with valuable feedback, but they’re busy. Developers want to know details, but they don’t have time to hunt down missing information.

Lag time between shipping software and actioning feedback is expensive, as developers have moved on to other work. Soliciting feedback early and often is critical, especially in an agile environment.

Remove the barriers for your customers by giving them a simple form with just the right prompt. The most valuable feedback for software developers is captured at the moment there is an impulse to provide it. Raw feedback captured quickly gives developers the context and feeling of the end user experience.

User Love

Removing barriers increases the amount of feedback you get, and eliminates the risk of emotions clouded by the difficulty of providing said feedback. If you make people jump through hoops to let you know what they think, you’ll either piss them off or lose them altogether.

A simple feedback process makes users happy, because they want to help! Since we started using Issue Collectors to capture feedback, over 90% of our feedback has contained optional name and email address. This makes it easy to open up a two-way dialog with users interested in helping.

Differentiate your Organization

If you aren’t capturing user feedback, your competitors are – and they will use that information to make a better product. Simply the action of capturing user feedback will help you stand out:

“The Issue Collector is a value-add for our business, and it sets us apart from other competitors.” – LogicSpot, UK based web design firm

Set your development team up for success and show your customer that you care about their input.

Why Jira Issue Collector

Jira and the Issue Collector have several benefits:

  • Collect feedback from anyone: Users don’t need to have or sign up for an account
  • Collect feedback in any web application or web-site: The Issue Collector generates a simple, in-app/in-browser form
  • Set it up to make sense to your users: The feedback button style & text and form fields are up to you
  • Collect details about the user’s environment that may be impacting their experience: Browser, OS, URL, and more captured automatically
  • Feedback can be actioned!  Feedback is created as Jira Issues so you can assign feedback and apply whatever workflow suits
  • Get feedback directly to developers: Devs see the raw feedback that users enter, no chance for dilution

For Users

Your Jira project is probably optimized for your development team, but not for your customers. The Jira Issue Collector lets you decide how to present questions and invite feedback in a way that makes sense for your users.

The issue collector couldn’t be simpler to use: click a button, type in a field, hit submit.

Feedback Form

For Developers

Instead of translating data from survey tools, forwarding around emails, or using a third party feedback tool, get things in Jira, where your developers already work! The Issue Collector shows developers raw user feedback, because someone’s word choice conveys their emotional state of mind in a way that can get lost if a middle-man takes user feedback and puts it into charts and graphs.

As a developer, which do you find more helpful?

Feedback Pie Chart and List

A great side benefit is that developers hear positive feedback too! It’s motivating for folks who normally just see bug reports to hear from someone whose life is made better because of your software.

Example Feedback

In the Real World: Opening the Floodgates

If you’re using Jira OnDemand, you may have noticed a small button in the bottom-right of the issue view last week.

Issue Collector ChartWe shipped Jira 5.1 to our OnDemand customers with an issue collector ready to go, and the feedback collected didn’t go to marketing, sales, or support – it went directly to the Jira development team.

Within a day, we had hundreds of pieces of feedback, and a member of the Jira design team said:

It’s awesome getting feedback that quickly. I believe we should ship the “Got Feedback for the new {feature|look|whatever}?” link more often.

Jira developers were able to see user feedback on a massive scale within a single day of launch. That’s incredible!

Start Collecting Feedback Today

  • Add to your existing Jira project
  • Quick & easy 3-step setup
  • If you aren’t using Jira 5.1 yet, you can get the plugin for 5.0!

Pipe User Feedback Straight To Developers