What is the best way to cater for users reporting bugs ?

Question

ok, Bugzilla would scare the willies out of the average end-user. Even things like Mantis are a little spooky for the uninitiated.

What method, web package (preferred), interface, whatever can I implement to make it easy, intuitive and not-at-all-intimidating for my end users & customers to report bugs in an intelligible manner?

I like the idea of something forms-based, or point-and-clicky, rather than the prior knowledge needed by something as comprehensive and intimidating as Bugzilla.

Email, while approachable for the average punter, seems less than ideal since it doesn't prompt the user for the kinds of information I need to try & figure out what is broken.

So far Bugs - The Bug Genie seems like the least scary option to confront the average user with. I searched but didn't find any questions like mine.

Suggestions, ideas, insights please !

Answer 1

I don't have a specific product to recommend, but the company who provides our work software has a "client" area on their website. You log in, click "report a problem", and then fill out a simple form where you pick the product and fill in the textbox as to what the problem is. It also has the ability to attach a screenshot/file.

The user has the ability to see the problems they've reported as well as the status (new, assigned, fixed). I assume once I submit the form it dispatches an email to the appropriate group, but I don't know for sure.

Of course, when I fill out a bug report, I include steps to reproduce, etc; but as far as "not scary", I think this way is pretty simple, both for coding and for the end user. Others in the office with no computer skills have filed reports with no problems.

---

Conversely, I use Digsby as my chat client, and they provide a "Submit Bug Report" option under the Help menu. This opens a window where I can type in my problem, I have the option to include a snapshot that it takes of Digsby's open windows (cool, because teaching a user to "print screen", paste into MS Paint, etc, isn't easy), and then when I send it off, it pulls diagnostic logs along with it.

I like this way too, because it has the built-in ability to show somebody what's wrong (especially with display bugs).

Answer 2

Well I wanna say this is the job of QA - regular users are not the right kinda people to be filling out bug reports. But if you need a way to capture user issues, I'd try using something like a dedicated forum topic in vBulletin or phpBB or similar.

Answer 3

The screenshots in Bug Genie look a little advanced for the average user. Not sure if this is a web app or desktop app, but I'd try to set up something that's just a few easy clicks and kinda a description of what they were doing when the bug occurred.

If possible, giving them an option of automatically sending log files and machine specs would be nice, but that's dependent on whether or not that's available.

We use FogBugz as our bug tracking software, and have made a submit error dialog that allows the user to send a message along with the stacktrace. Obviously if this is a web app that's probably not an option, but try to get as much automated information as you can get

Answer 4

You're absolutely right - it's not up to the user to use bugzilla. that's for devs.

Error reporting from the user side needs to be really simple if you expect users to use it. (ie. When I see the "report this bug to MS" i usually hit cancel even though it's a one-click mechanism.)

It's also not just about you getting the info you need to track the bug, it's also about making the user feel like something's being done, like they're being taken care of, so keep that in mind.

As a result of all this, I'd go with whatever bug tracking package suited you as a developer and then feed into that from a nice, simple, friendly web-form interface built specifically for your end users.

Then when an error occurs, try to only ask the user questions you can't answer programatically. Ideally, your exception handling should already track their current action (saving an invoice), current context (invoice screen), the entity being acted upon(invoice #10013), and all the exception info from the program. If you can't capture this and retrieve it remotely, feed it to your web form (in URL params or whatever) when the user clicks 'report this issue'. Ensure you pay attention to any sensitive data requirements.

Then you should only need to ask your users the human questions like - 'How can we best contact you about this issue?' (method / times / etc.), and give them an idea of how long it'll take for them to get a response from a human.

I realise this doesn't offer a software recommendation, but hopefully it's still good advice for handling your issue.

Answer 5

The answer was staring me in the face, right at the bottom of this page. Services like UserVoice are a great way for end users to nominate & vote for bugs, changes etc.

Answer 6

i've hacked mantis a bit.

• email-to-mantis functionality (not quite stable out of the box yet).
• a simplified version of mantis' simple bug report form, just stripped everything not required by mantis to save a new issue

a mantis bug report form might not be appropriate (i.e., realistic) for enterprise customers, but it's useful for my non-tech co-workers (and even my co-devs...)

and it's easy to get customer email to mantis, both incoming (fw) and outgoing (bcc).