[WIP] Concerns around the Ideation process. How are new requests handled in the Idea Board tool for Bricks Builder?

[d19dotca]

Thank you for responding, @Thomas! I really appreciate the detailed reply.

@thomas

The idea board is public and available to anyone to submit his/her idea/feature request. Customer or not. Doesn’t matter.

While this allows us to collect more ideas, and get a better sense about what not-yet customers are missing in Bricks, the board is not meant to publish every submitted idea automatically for everyone to comment & upvote on. This would make the entire idea board quickly completely useless & overwhelming as we receive hundreds of submissions every months.

The vast majority of which we have to delete, because …

Every idea must fulfill the following criterias:

• It’s a new feature request or improvement (not a bug report)
• Be technically possible & feasible to implement
• Has sufficient user demand; serving a substantial percentage of our user base
• Fit into the overall vision of Bricks as a product

Therefore every idea is manually reviewed and either 1) rejected 2) approved or 3) put on hold for further evaluation/later consideration.

This makes complete sense to me and I’m glad that Bricks team is focused on filtering out the feature requests a bit to ensure it’s a clean list while also being something that is feasible to implement down the road and fits into the vision of the product.

With that said, I do believe there are some (an unknown amount since I can only speak for myself) which fall through the cracks and that’s the portion I’d like to see addressed. Speaking for my own experience, there have been several which were filed but never approved despite me even being asked by the support team to file them.

Example: IMPLEMENTED: Automatically regenerate CSS when updating Bricks (1.8.1) – I created this about a year ago and filed the feature in the official Ideas Board around the same time, it was never approved. You mentioned in that one recently that it’s finally on the board now, however I noticed it’s not actually mine, so I’m not sure if they just filed it sooner than I had last year or something different, but it makes me think that there was a number of people then asking for it which none of which were approved at all despite strong support for it in the forum and in the Facebook group. I don’t think it should ever take a year to approve a feature request for voting on.

Example 2: NO BUG: Global Styles & CSS Classes are not exported when using WordPress Tools > Export function - #4 by d19dotca – It was suggested that I create a feature request on the Ideas Board for this since what I assumed was supported was not. From the forum post, you can see there is a great deal of issues in migrating Bricks data using the WordPress export/import functionality. Import/Export seems like a general basic functionality of any software, so it seems (to me at least) a reasonable expectation of the product, in which I’d hope that the feature request would at least be approved for voting on. But I still don’t see this one yet. Maybe there’s a reason this isn’t approved and that may be fair enough, but this shows a lack of follow-up currently where it’s implied we should file a feature request via the Ideas Board and then nearly two months later it’s still not on the board, without any follow-up. If this had been discussed instead in the forum as a Feature Request post, it’d be easier to follow-up with users submitting new requests (even if it’s no response but just a status change to “denied” or something like that).

@thomas

I was thinking to hook the deleted/rejected idea actions up with an automated email. But knowing from support this would create thousands of endless, pointless, and often angry discussions where we have to explain one by one why a feature was not approved. That’s not the intention of providing the idea board.

[…]

In light of the improved communication we currently work on, it might be possible to send out a release email and list your upvoted features at the end of it (in case they are included in this update, and you are a customer, meaning we have your email address). This way you’ll be immediately notified whenever one of your upvoted ideas makes it into Bricks.

Or we highlight your upvoted ideas in the changelog entry itself.

Honestly, I really support and encourage the idea of moving to the way Cwicly handles feature requests. They have voting features in the forum and track them all there which allows for easier discussions as well. I assume it can be opened up to be voted on publicly still (i.e. no forum account needed). The forum software will surely allow users to track them so nothing special is needed there. I suspect it would also likely stimulate a bit of growth in the forum by encouraging people to register to discuss the feature request if they have specific needs they want to add to the discourse of it. This would also allow feature requests to be kept in one area (right now it’s two areas and it’s difficult to track them all as there’s parts in forum which aren’t in the ideas board and vice-versa).

Again I appreciate the thoughtful reply. I think it shed light on the process. I think it also shows room for improvement though and at least highlights that some have fallen through the cracks. I’d love to see this improved for not only users but presumably would also improve communication on ideas for the Bricks team members as well.