Featurebase 101

Learn the basic terminology and concepts here.

Robi Rohumaa avatar
Written by Robi Rohumaa
Updated over a week ago

Welcome to Featurebase! πŸ˜€

This guide will cover all the basics to ensure that you're familiar with our product.

P.S. Join our Discord community to discuss features, get support, catch the latest updates, or simply take a moment to relax and chat with us over a virtual cup of coffee. β˜•


What Featurebase helps you do:

Capture feature requests, bug reports, product feedback, and more...

Featurebase allows you to effortlessly capture feedback from your users in a well-organized way. You can then track all these valuable insights and ideas in one united place.

Easily manage and prioritize feedback

Featurebase is the one source of truth for all your user feedback. We make it easy to find emerging trends from feedback with votes and comments from your users. Our mission is to help you make product decisions faster and more accurately, ensuring you don't waste time building unimportant features.

Give your users a voice

Use Featurebase to give your customers a sense of control and a place where they feel heard. Featurebase also automates communication about updates or changes to their wanted ideas, keeping them in the loop.


How to collect feedback?

It's quite simple! Here are the basics:

You can guide users into giving feedback with our widgets or embed boards on your page.

Once users are in your feedback portal, they can submit their ideas on different boards:

  • πŸ’‘ Feature Request

  • πŸ› Bug Reports

Those boards contain posts, and those posts contain comments. Users can also show interest in others' ideas by upvoting their posts.

This makes up the core of Featurebase. You can see it in action from our own feedback portal: https://feedback.featurebase.app


What is the feedback portal?

The feedback portal is where "all the magic happens" in Featurebase.

This is where users leave their feedback. They can either create a post themselves or find others' posts and upvote or comment on them.

This effectively gives your customers a voice and you the necessary data for making successful product decisions. πŸ“ˆ

Featurebase's feedback portal.


What are boards?

Boards are used for categorizing feedback.

All boards are public by default, meaning the posts made on them are visible to everyone who visits them. This means anyone who can find your board will see all posts on it. They will also appear in Google search results, etc.

But boards can also be private, in which case the posts are only visible to administrators and help keep internal feedback away from the public.

Here are some examples of commonly used boards:

  • πŸ’‘ Feature Request

  • πŸ› Bug Reports

  • πŸ“₯ Feedback

When your users go to leave feedback, they get to choose the board they wish to post to.

This makes it easy for you to filter between different types of feedback, such as feature requests or bug reports.

Good to know: We use AI to automatically assign the correct board based on the feedback the user has written. It's fine-tuned on the posts that you get on your board to achieve more accurate results.

Example of boards in Featurebase.


What are posts?

Posts are used to express a single idea or request.

Each post has a title, description, and many other useful things you can add. For example, you can set the estimated time (ETA) this feature will be released, or some additional tags like: "High Priority".

This is what one of the posts from our board looks like:

Exaxmple post in Featurebase.


What are comments?

Comments are used for discussion under a certain post. You can ask questions from the author to clarify use cases or see what other people think about the idea.

Commenting sends out email notifications ensuring the other party stays informed about it and can respond promptly.

Good to know: You can mention all users and posts basically everywhere in Featurebase using @


What are votes?

One of the most useful things in Featurebase is the ability to upvote or downvote posts.

This gives you and your team a clear idea of what your customers need most and can help you prioritize feature development.

Here is our board sorted by upvotes:

Featurebase feedback sorted by upvotes.

Whenever users upvote a post, they'll automatically start receiving emails about status changes and comments on that post.

For example, upvoted users will get an email after you change the status of a post from "In Review" β†’ "Planned"

This is an awesome way to keep customers engaged with your product.

Good to know: You can also create posts & vote on behalf of your users.


What are statuses?

Statuses are used to indicate the current state of a post.

By default, Featurebase has the following statuses you can give to a post:

  • In Review

  • Planned

  • In Progress

  • Completed

  • Duplicate

  • Rejected

When you complete a Feature, make sure to update its status to reflect the current state. You can do this through your roadmap or the post itself.

This helps to ensure that users who are interested in this feature are kept in the loop!

Different statuses in Featurebase.


What is a Roadmap?

Use the roadmap to give an overview of all the things you are working on or have already completed.

Your roadmap has 3 different views:

  • Status roadmap

  • Quarterly roadmap

  • Monthly roadmap

The roadmap is updated automatically when you change the status or ETA of a post.

Picture of Featurebase roadmap.


What is a Changelog?

Create changelogs to showcase new updates on your page. All subscribed users will also receive updates about releases via email.

This is an effective way to close the feedback loop and get big updates in front of your users.


Conclusion

We're super happy to see you using Featurebase.

We put our heart and soul into making this the best possible feedback tool and hope you find it as useful as we do! πŸ’™

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