Using BugHerd to Track Visual Feedback on Websites

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BugHerd is about collecting visual feedback for websites.

If you’re like me, you’re constantly looking at your own websites and you’re constantly critiquing them. I think that’s healthy. Nothing gets better if you look at your own work and consider it perfectly finished. This is where BugHerd shines. With BugHerd, anytime you have one of those little “uh oh this area is a little rough” moments while looking at your site, you can log it to be dealt with.

Let’s take a look at a workflow like that. I’m going to assume you’ve signed up for a BugHerd account (if not grab a free trial here) and either installed the script on your site or have installed the browser extension and are using that.

I’ve done that for this very site. So now I’m looking at a page like our Archives Page, and I spot some stuff that is a little off.

I’ve taken a screenshot and circled the things that I think are visually off:

  1. The “Top Tags” and dropdown arrow are pretty far separated with nothing much connecting them. Maybe dropdowns like that should have a background or border to make that more clear.
  2. There is a weird shadow in the middle of the bottom line.

With BugHerd, I can act upon that stuff immediately. Rather than some janky workflow involving manual screenshots and opening tickets on some other unrelated website, I can do it right from the site itself.

  1. I open the BugHerd sidebar
  2. I click the green + button
  3. Select the element around where I want to give the visual feedback
  4. Enter the details of the bug

Their help video does a great job of showing this.

Here’s me logging one of those bugs I found:

Now, the BugHerd website becomes my dashboard for dealing with visual bugs. This unlocks a continual cycle of polish that that is how great websites get great!

Note the kanban board setup, which is always my prefered way to work on any project. Cards are things that need to be worked on and there are columns for cards that aren’t started, started, and finished. Perhaps your team works another way though? Maybe you have a few more columns you generally kanban with, or you name them in a specific way? That’s totally customizable in BugHerd.

I love that BugHerd itself is customizable, but at a higher level, the entire workflow is customizable and that’s even better.

  • I can set up BugHerd just for myself and use it for visual improvement work on my own projects
  • I can set up BugHerd for just the design team and we can use it among ourselves to track visual issues and get them fixed.
  • I can set up BugHerd for the entire company, so everyone feels empowered to call out visual rough spots.
  • I can set up BugHerd for clients, if I’m a freelancer or agency worker, so that the clients themselves can use it to report visual feedback.
  • I can open up BugHerd wide open so that guests of these websites can use it to report visual problems.

Check out this example of a design team with core members and guests and their preferred workflow setup:

It’s hard to imagine a better dedicated tool than BugHerd for visual feedback.