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Customer vote counting

lasmit

My company makes a public facing iPhone app.

We encourage our customers to give us feedback to help us improve the product, they do this using helpscout (which is just fancy email).

At the moment we collect all the submissions in a spreadsheet with columns like this:

id, description, votes

we can then sort by votes and help to decide what to work on next.

It’s important to note that the customer doesn’t need to login or know about the spreadsheet, our support reps increment the vote count.

Is it possible to do something like this with Jira?

Accepted answers

All comments

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

Jira does have a voting system, but it needs people to be logged in, as each person's vote is a recorded as a line in the database with their name. This is to prevent people voting more than onc.

Totally anonymous voting systems are utterly useless, they can be gamed by scripts or bots in seconds, and Atlassian have very few requests for voting systems more clever than the one they have.

Also, if you can't see an issue, you can't vote on it. If you can see the issues, then you can see the data that you're putting in the spreadsheet.

lasmit

> Totally anonymous voting systems are utterly useless, they can be gamed by scripts or bots in seconds, and Atlassian have very few requests for voting systems more clever than the one they have

Yeah it seems I’m the only person who wants to privately collate user feedback without passing all the burden onto my customers. (Although how Atlassian know that when they make it so hard to collect feedback seems tricky to answer)

Also it’s pretty jarring to have your question be called “utterly useless” by a “community leader” who hasn’t even properly read the question.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

I am very sorry, I phrased my answer very badly.

The only thing I was aiming to call "utterly useless" was the concept of completely anonymous voting. Your question was the opposite - a very good question, well written and clear, with a clear goal. I apologise for putting it so badly.

But you can't do this, and there's no logical way you can. If you don't have a way to establish that someone has voted, the voting system is instantly wide open to abuse. You have to have something that prevents it being gamed. You could argue for an anonymised token based on something unique to the voter (for example a hash of their email address), but even that means that you have to be able to get and rely on that unique thing. Email addresses wil also fail as its a doddle to create swathes of them. The minimum you need is a verifiable thing that you know you can trust, and the most simple one of those is a user account.

Andy Heinzer

Hi @lasmit

I understand that you are looking for a means to gather customer feedback within Jira Cloud, but don't really want to burden your customers with this process. I see that you are currently having your Service Desk Agents manage this data in a separate spreadsheet. While this does separate the customer from the process, it feels like this process could be subject to error or unexpected change. Such as what happens when two users try to edit the spreadsheet at the same time?

I can relate to the desire here to make it as easy as possible for your customers. However Jira's native voting features require that users be logged in, and also be licensed Jira users. There are some plugins/add-ons that extend this to Jira Service Desk customers (unlicensed users) such as Roadmap Portal for Jira Service Desk, but I believe that this too still requires that user to be able to login to the customer portal.

Have you seen the Jira Service Desk Cloud Widget? It's a form that allows you embed some javascript on a page outside of Jira that your users can utilize to create requests/issues in Jira. This is included Jira Service Desk Cloud natively. The benefit here is that they technically don't need to login to Jira to use this, and each time they do it creates a request in Jira Service Desk project. This could help with the first part of just collecting feedback from end users without needing them to login to Jira.

You could then still use other means to collate or compile that feedback into a scoring system on which features to work on. While that could still be a spreadsheet, I was thinking that perhaps you could just create a custom field in that project, and your agents could set the value of that field to be the same for all the issues that match a particular feature request you have. Not sure if this would be a label, or single select, or some other custom field type yet. But if each issue in Jira has some field that is the same here, then you can use the JQL in Jira in order to search for these. In my view this is one way to make it easier to try to see this data without truly using the concept of voting here. You could even extend this into a dashboard gadget that can then show you at a glance the number of issues that match a particular JQL query based on that info.

Let me know what you think.

Andy

Sara Dubuque

Hi @lasmit -

I don't have an immediate solution for you, but my team at Atlassian is currently exploring features and tools that solve exactly this sort of problem.

We'd love to chat with you and learn more about how your team works and how you use user input to prioritize and make decisions. If you're interested, send me an email at sdubuque@atlassian.com and we'll get something set up.

Thanks!

lasmit

Yeah I guess voting isn't the right word. Sorry for the confusion.

What I'm looking for is closer to sentiment analysis. I'm not looking to elect anyone, just to get data over what features requests are popular without burdening the user.

It's also worth pointing out that in the modern world there are lots of ways for customers to give feedback other than a direct contact request. Some examples from the top of my head:

Facebook page or group
Twitter
App store reviews
Product Hunt

I think probably Jira is coming from a background of being more of an internal bug tracking tool and so it's not unreasonable that it doesn't track this kind of thing.

It's not a silly idea tho.

lasmit

I agree spreadsheets are bad, that's why I'm looking into other solutions

What you have described is pretty close to what we are doing already, I'll keep it in mind going forward, thanks.

lasmit

I'll drop you a message. I'd be interested to hear how Atlassian and Atlassian's customers are currently dealing with this problem currently.

For example, will me posting in this forum be "counted" anywhere?

mararn1618 _secretbakery.io_

Hey @lasmit , curious to see how it played out for you. Are you still with the spreadsheet? ;-)

Micah Spieler

I'm watching this, because I've been searching for a similar solution all morning and have come up relatively empty.

Our scenario is similar — our sales team gets feature requests all day long. I want to organize it into a central place that can be used by our product and engineering teams. My idea is for a Jira board to collect feature requests, and to use some kind of "counter" for how many times that request has been made.

The voting feature doesn't do this because of the reasons mentioned above — you need to be logged in and we don't give every prospective customer access to our Jira (nor would we want to).

I'm surprised that this is such a tricky thing to figure out!

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