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Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy

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Re: Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy

#31

Post by eastbound »

pxtail wrote: post #7

I won't report bugs in paid software/services because it's not my job, I'm not paid for it, I'm user of the service, not free workforce so they can reduce amount of QA staff or skip it completely. Give me a discount and then maybe , just maybe I'll think twice about reporting something. Bugs renders your soft unusable? Fine, there is plenty of competition out there who will do it right.

I tell my customers that they should spend 1hr per month “improving the vendor”.

See, if you rely on a vendor, then you need them to survive. It’s a parasite-host relationship. You need to tell them what you need, and oftentimes they will bend the roadmap in favour of the most demanded features. Alternatives:

- They choose their most amusing feature,

- They choose the most lucrative feature among the new possible markets while ignoring all bugs, which is the most rational way to address bugs unfortunately,

- You don’t tell them, they don’t improve, they die / they triple the price of the product by lack of audience, and you have to migrate your data to another product.

Re: Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy

#32

Post by I_dream_of_Geni »

kccqzy wrote: post #18
I_dream_of_Geni wrote: post #10

You write that "reporting bugs is usually a terrible experience". I find bugs ALL THE TIME, and yet, when I even try to find a way to contact ANYONE, let alone a developer, they leave no door open at all. No method, no form, no contact name, no nothing. I (along with many, I presume), actually want those companies to excel. I WANT to let them know what to fix. But, they just don't want to hear about it. Really sad I…

In my experience it's because the companies have not hired any persons whose job is to triage bug reports. People do find bugs all the time, and making it super frictionless to report bugs will result in a deluge of reports. Some reports will be outright spam, some could be mistaking a feature for a bug, some could be duplicates. Someone needs to do the triage and try to reproduce before the issue is forwarded to dev…

Wait... Isn't that what AI is for? To do that for "free" and removing the time an actual person has to spend on it? Separating the spam and duplicates, etc?

Re: Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy

#35

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

airza wrote: post #24
mmsc wrote: post #4

The difficulty in reporting a bug comes from the friction required to filter the "page doesn't work" with no further explanation reports, or the "my neighbour is a spy for the government and I have proof" reports (real types of reports for a browser company, for example, which surely exist for other places users think that "is" the internet like Facebook). I agree that reporting bugs can be hard, but the amount of sp…

With all due respect, That is the price you pay for your users doing _free_ software testing for you! We are on the “listen to your users” mecca and you’re complaining that listening to your users is hard and you wish a machine could help you with it.

> you’re complaining that listening to your users is hard and you wish a machine could help you with it.

That's entirely the wrong take, IMO.

Listening to users is easy, but the users often don't say anything when they speak. Those non-reports are basically spam that should be automatically thrown away.

Re: Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy

#37

Post by lupusreal »

cosmotic wrote: post #19

For many corporations, there are probably perverse incentives against making it easy to report bugs.KPI of reported bugs as an indicator of software quality, for example.

It's not just a problem in the corporate context. Open source projects usually make it a pain in the ass to submit bug reports too, in a clear effort to gatekeep the process to experienced developers. Simply because developers prefer to only deal with other developers and don't want to hear complaints about their software from the unwashed masses.

Re: Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy

#40

Post by busymom0 »

eastbound wrote: post #22
I_dream_of_Geni wrote: post #10

You write that "reporting bugs is usually a terrible experience". I find bugs ALL THE TIME, and yet, when I even try to find a way to contact ANYONE, let alone a developer, they leave no door open at all. No method, no form, no contact name, no nothing. I (along with many, I presume), actually want those companies to excel. I WANT to let them know what to fix. But, they just don't want to hear about it. Really sad I…

I think if you take for example apps on the Atlassian Marketplace, probably all of them have an easy way to contact them (Probably because they get Jira for free, granted).

I develop for iOS and Android. All my apps have a Send Feedback button which opens an email in the user's default email client with my address in the To field, pre-filled subject line and some diagnostic info in the body (things like version number, device type, iOS version etc). I get all my bug reports and feedback that way and respond to them via a reply email when I have released the update to fix it.
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