Buggy and missing key features :(
I've played around with IdeaNote for a few hours and here's what I can say.
PROS
1. It's a cool idea.
2. I can see it being quite helpful if you have a similar process to the one intended.
CONS:
1. It's buggy. I had a column view bug out and become unresponsive with an 'unknown error' happening in the bottom bar.
2. I also made an automation to move an idea from one collection to another based on likes but immediately hit 2 snags: a) when the idea gets copied across to the collection, it actually appears in EVERY phase instead of in the inbox phase as intended. b) even linking a COMMENT in the idea sends it to the other collection. (hmmmm... surely this can't be desired behaviour!?)
3. It seems to be impossible to allow people to choose what phase their ideas go in without giving them edit access (which allows them to do all kind of things they shouldn't do). This is a HUGE oversight and probably a dealbreaker for me unless I can figure out a workaround.
4. Some really obvious things like having a single column (phase) be uneditable by viewers seems to be not actually possible -they can still comment by the look of it. Also when you move idea cards to other phases they seem to somehow pick up multiple actions (even duplicated ones!) - this is truly annoying and confusing from a UI perspective. Other things liek being able to edit the text of the 'add' idea button which just says 'add' would be nice - kind of surprising this functionality isn't there.
Overall I would say it's promising but actually quite inflexible as a tool which I find really frustrating :(
Jakob_Ideanote
May 9, 2024I'm very sorry to hear about this experience! We are really trying our best to build a flexible platform for working with ideas.
On 3) It is very possible to decide where ideas land - you can set one phase as the inbox phase and ideas will land there. You can also add in-app automations if you would like to route ideas based on their content or other metadata.
On 4) You decide who has access to which Phase - you can absolutely have an Idea Collection where your crowd is only allowed to submit ideas - while a select few or a Team can e.g. comment on ideas or rate on ideas. The process is entirely up to you and flexible in that way. Ideanote is opinionated in the way that we believe that ideas should move forward and be taken action on, so each Phase comes with an action, e.g. to comment. But, again, it's up to you who should be allowed to be involved in each step.
I'll note down that you would like to have a different label on the "Add" button, can I ask why that is?
On the Phase buggyness, we have not experienced that with other customers and can not reproduce it. It might be a browser or plugin problem. Could you possibly send a screenrecording of the problem? We would love to hunt the bug down. If you write to us in the helpchat on our website and leave your email and a screenrecording we'd love to get back to you there as well or possibly schedule a short walkthrough.
I hope we can help you make ideas matter with Ideanote -
Jakob