Bugs. Make them caught, reported and fixed – in just a few clicks

Learn how developers saving time and turning users’ complains into valuable info without endless phone calls or expensive focus groups. Get a free trial and learn tips and tricks in this article.

You write great code. Seriously, you do! Well, sometimes there are occasional bugs (just a handful). Let’s start with a quiz: How a user can report a bug he found to you?

• Through a call directly to your cell phone in a middle of the night?
• Through a bulky email with tons of screenshots and a long text, that looks like Sharknado 2 screenplay?
• By simply going online and publishing a nasty review on app store, blog or Facebook?

When success of your app heavily depends on both speed of development and initial users’ feedback – catching info about issues with an app is ultimately important. But who has time to spend on the phone, when a user desperately tries to describe what happens on the screen, or even worse – trying to explain a regular user how to install special screen sharing software, establish connection etc. You know it’s hard for an average consumer. So in the article below we would like to introduce a Middle Eastern start-up that can help you turn your users’ feedback into something helpful and actionable to you.

Bugrius is cloud based bug report generator that unlike other services allows users to create clear and easy to understand video reports with audio commentary. Here we brought Roman Konovalov, Managing Director and the owner of Greenrain - Dubai based company that works in health care market. Greenrain was one of the first customers of this new bug reporting solution, so we thought it would be great to let them talk about the real life experience and tips & tricks.

What software you develop and who is your target audience?

We work with more than 1500 customers across UAE, Qatar and KSA. We build a few types of line of business applications for them. And a few consumer apps to support it. So end users of our software are office workers and consumers in general. What is common among all of them is the level of expectations – everything should just work and be really intuitive. And another common thing is level of frustration when something goes wrong. We learned that we can’t expect from a regular user to write us an email with bug report, and even when they do write it – it’s so tough for our devs to really figure out what exactly the issue was. So providing our users with the simplest possible bug report solution (no calls, no emails etc.) was our key priority. Thanks to Bugrius we got exactly this experience.

What exact experience your customers get with Bugrius?

Basically, with our apps we ship a simple link that being clicked installs or launched small Bugrius client connected to our portal. All a user needs to do when facing an issue is just hit the link, press record button, do exactly what he or she did to repro the bug and hit send. A compressed video report will be securely published on our portal whenever user is online next time (some of our apps are used in the offline mode, but we still want this guys to share the feedback). The most important thing for the user was no complicated controls or forms to fill in and with this client one-button-type of reporting was highly appreciated.

Any feedback from your development team so far?

First of all we need to say that we in our development process already have bug tracker in use. Our testers and dev teams have established process on prioritizing bugs and workflow to fix them. So we were really pleased to see seamless integration of Bugrius with our current bug tracker infrastructure. So the feedback from a user arrives not in just somebody’s email, but goes directly into the bug tracker, where responsible team members can evaluate, prioritize and assign the fix to a particular developer or a team. The rest of the process is just as it always been, but now with bug description not in a long text format only, but with a link to easy to view video report with audio commentary right from the user. Nice side effect of this is that we have less bug reports dismissed with classic “no repro” reason (as you know every dev sometimes overuses this one J)

What would you recommend to your fellow developers on collecting users’ feedback in general?

Well, the obvious thing – users’ feedback is make it or break it thing nowadays. There is no way people stuck with software they don’t like. That is correct for consumers, but also for LOB apps users too. And how you deal with negative feedback (there is always some even in the best apps) is crucial. If you don’t it will go in a snowball type of thing somewhere on the Internet, social media or straight forward on the store. Losing a star of rating just because a user got frustrated is painful. Thanks to services like Bugrius user’s voice now can be heard loud and clear. And what’s more important – heard directly by your team, without any public mess. And as developers who sell software ourselves we see Bugrius pricing, just few cents per report, as very reasonable. When someone says “we heavily invest in reacting to our customers’ feedback” - it rarely can be estimated as precisely and usually not that effective like with this solution. Put your users first, take their feedback and complains seriously – and the best news is with services like Bugrius it’s easy to see how your few cents investment pays off.

Get free (no strings attached) Bugrius trial to put your users first!