Product Availability
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Forum Organization
Before reading this, you should get acquainted with our Getting Started Guide here.
There are three key features that will assist you with organizing ideas: Forums, Categories, and Labels. Setting up these items will help you optimize the time you spend reviewing your new ideas.
The structure of your forum should be prioritized to:
- Provide a frictionless experience for your voters
- Promote sensible organization for your admins to keep on top of relevant ideas
- Reduce duplicate ideas and management overhead
Forums
Visibility: External facing
Audience: Voters and admins
Forums are the primary external-facing area to your user base and should be optimized as such for your end-users so that any person submitting ideas will never be confused about where to enter their feedback on your web portal. Ideas can only live in one forum.
Your user base should always be considered. What makes sense to them?
- Reference your community - is there a breakdown that your users are already familiar with? If the community is broken down by specific products/feature sets, then it makes sense to align here.
Forums for each product or product module
- If a product has many large "modules", we would recommend setting up each of these modules as a forum.
- Example forum names could be: “[Product name] Features” for a general forum, "Product name" for a site with multiple product lines
Forums to avoid: bug reports and internal feedback, and user groups
- Having a separate forum for bugs is not recommended, as this can be a tricky designation to navigate.
- Using separate forums for internal feedback, that is, your company providing feedback on the product, is not recommended as it increases the chances of duplicate ideas.
- Segmenting forums by user groups is not recommended, as this often leads to duplicate ideas.
Read more about setting up forums here.
Categories
Visibility: External facing
Audience: Voters and admins
Forum categories not only help you organize your ideas for reporting on later, but they also allow your voters to know what kind of ideas you’re looking for. Categories are public-facing so they should be broader groups that are obvious to your voters. Ideas can only live in one forum and one category.
Your voters will be selecting the category themselves. When creating categories, think as your voters would think.
For usability, we recommend no more than 12 categories per forum.
- Too many categories can increase the effort for voters to provide ideas. If you are concerned about helping your admins keep things organized, labels are the best option and we’ll cover that next.
Optimize your categories to be familiar to voters leaving ideas
- Categories can be features of a product or product areas that are familiar to your voters.
- Common examples are specific feature sets such as: Reporting, Search, Mobile Optimization, Reporting, Analytics, Search, iOS, Android.
Read more about setting up categories here.
Labels
Visibility: Admins only, internal facing
Audience: Admins
Labels are applied to ideas, and allow you to internally categorize ideas in the admin console.
Since they are not visible to the voters on your forum, they allow you to organize more specifically for internal practices. With labels, you can quickly filter through to understand common themes.
Examples of commonly used labels are:
Product Areas, Release Timelines (Q1,Q2,etc.), Effort Required, Severity, Feature Names, Feature, Bug, Usability, Strategic Value, Seasonality, Product Owner
Read more about setting up labels here.
Saved Views
Visibility: Admins only, internal facing
Audience: Admins
You can create saved views for quick looks into and notifications of relevant ideas with forum organization. Forum organization will help you quickly access your data and receive notifications on relevant ideas through the use of saved views.
Admins should have at least one saved view created that relates to the ideas they most often work with. Saved views can be created with any of our filtering options - forums, categories, labels, statuses, and keyword searches.
- Saved views will allow you to quickly pull up the information you need to look for and allow you to receive a daily notification of activity that meets the filters of the view you set up.
Examples:
- Lisa, a Product Manager, will want to save a view for ideas in the "Integrations" forum
- A Product Specialist responsible for responding to ideas will want to save a view for ideas that have no status or no response.
- A VP of Product will want to have a saved view for ideas with completed statuses and labels for impact on company initiatives.
Read more about setting up saved views here.