Looking for Feedback on a Baseline / Timeline Report

[Justin Meyer]

Hey all, I'm working on an open-source Baseline Report.  You can see it here:   https://timeline-report.bitovi-jira.com/

The goal of this app is to show what's changed on a project timeline. For example, it can tell you if an epic's timing has changed, or if something w/i the epic is blocked.

The secondary goal is to make the reports look very nice. 

We're working on a redesign with a professional designer.  However, I'd like to get some community feedback. What do you think about the following:

Would you find a tool like this useful?

What features would you want it to have?

Some feature suggestions:

- Showing percentage completion changes (was 30% is now 35% complete)

- Showing timelines for Design/Dev/QA/UAT 

- Excel export so your own reports can be built

[Joanna Weber]

That's a nice-looking report - clear and colourful. If it's not already capable of showing dependencies between items on the list, that would be something to consider.

In terms of asking for feedback, I can tell you as a researcher that those particular questions are unlikely to provide you with reliable information. People are very bad at predicting their own future behaviour, or of really understanding their actual needs in terms of features, so this information has to be teased out indirectly.

If you can find a professional researcher to help you with customer discovery interviews then that is your best option: it's a discipline, like engineering, that takes time and training to learn to do well.

If you're not in a position to hire a pro researcher, most longer UX Design courses (the ones that last months or years) teach the basics of research, so if the designer you're working with has taken a research module as part of their course, they should be able to help you there.

Research training includes learning how to observe users and draw insights from what you see: the analysis and interpretation is just as important as gathering answers to non-leading questions.

If none of that is possible, I can recommend two valuable sources of information:

1. 'The Mom Test' by Rob Fitzpatrick - it's a book aimed at founders on how to ask questions that will get you more reliable answers. (If you ask your mother if she'd buy your app, she'll always say yes, just to please you!)

2. The website alexandercowan.com and Alex's book 'Hypothesis Driven Development', which has templates and examples.

All the best with your app - it's a very useful idea.

[Justin Meyer]

Thanks Joanna, we are gearing up to do UX testing. Interested in participating?

[Justin Meyer]

The other thing it does is try to make an image that would fit in PowerPoint. 

Do you show stakeholders Plans or Timeline?  

In my experience, most people are hand rolling reports themselves. 

[Joanna Weber]

@Justin MeyerI'm afraid i'm super-busy lately so can't participate in anything.

If you have several feature ideas in mind, it can be useful to roughly sketch out each UI (it doesn't matter if you can't draw well) and get participants to comment about what they like or don't like about each one.

Other ideas for testing feature ideas:

1. Write the name (e.g. Percentage Complete) of each idea and a brief description on small cards. Get each participant to rank them in order of preference (you can do this in most survey software with a Ranking question and a photo and/or text description of the idea.
2. Assign an imaginary cash value to each feature, e.g. $5 each for three features. Tell participants they have a fixed budget e.g. $10 so that they cannot afford to buy every feature. Ask which they'd buy.
3. If they could "afford" two features, tell them that one is now $10 and one they hadn't chosen is now free. Do they change their choice? Why?

[Rob Mkrtchian _CAIAT_US_]

What is the main thing I can get with your product that I can't with Jira Plans (Advanced Roadmaps)? Are you targeting Jira users who are on Standard or Free plan and wo don't have access to Jira Plans?

[Justin Meyer]

Thanks Rob. The main thing it does is show changes. It compares Jira at say, the start of the quarter to what it looks like now. 

Often folks want to know what’s changed. 

We are targeting plans users as it lacks this ability.