Public Board 101

FeatureCat is all about using user feedback to build the best product possible - and the public board is the key interface for that.

What is the public board?

The public board is a public interface that allows users to submit feedback and vote on existing feedback. It is the key interface for users to interact with your product team. It is also the key interface for your product team to interact with your users regarding product development.

How does it work?

The public board is hosted by FeatureCat and publicly available on the web. Everyone with the link can access it and view planned features, their respective votes and comments.

The way to gather feedback and have your app’s or product’s users interact with it, let them submit feedback, vote on features, or leave comments, is by integrating the public board into your app and authenticating your users with FeatureCat.

That way, only real users of your app can provide feedback, and you can provide both a consistent experience to your users, as they don’t have to leave your app to provide feedback, and can also see their previous votes and comments when they visit the public board again.

What can users do on the public board?

The public board is structured around the core part of product development: features.

What makes FeatureCat unique is the fact that your team can defines all features, which are (if toggled as public) visible on the public board. Users can then vote on the features they want to see implemented, and leave comments on features to provide additional context or feedback.

Users can also submit new suggestions and ideas, which in FeatureCat are created as artifacts. Those are not visible to the users, but only to your team. Your team can triage those artifacts and decide whether to create a new feature from it, link it to feature already added to FeatureCat, or discard it.

All interactions are linked to the authenticated user (votes, comments, suggestions), so that your team can see who is providing feedback and can reach out to them if necessary. Artifacts are only visible to your team, and votes are anonymous to the public. For comments, you can choose whether to display full attribution (name), a redacted name for privacy, or no attribution at all (anonymous), as discussed in the user comments section.

How does the user limit work?

Some plans come with user limits (e.g. 1000 users on the Starter plan).

Once you have reached the user limit of your current plan, returning users who already visited the public board through your app, and may or may not have provided feedback, can continue to authenticate and contribute to your public board. New users, who have not previously authenticated on your public board, can still visit the board, but are not signed in and cannot contribute anymore - for them the board appears “locked”.

How can I configure the public board?

The public board is fully customizable and can be branded to fit your product’s look and feel, to make it feel like a seamless part of your app.

Branding and customization

You can upload your logo, adjust the colors for both the light and dark theme, and provide a title and headline. You can also choose whether to automatically adapt to the user’s system theme, or to always display the light or dark theme.

Email Capture

Having a user’s email address can be key to follow up with the user on their suggestions. Depending on your app, you may already have the user’s email address, for example as part of your app’s login system. In that case, you can provide it to FeatureCat when authenticating the user.

For apps however, that do not require an email address, you can optionally ask the user to share their email address when submitting a their first suggestion, and it’ll automatically be added to their profile.

FeatureCat provides three options for email capture:

• Email capture disabled: Users are not asked to provide their email address. You can still provide the email address when authenticating the user.
• Email capture optional: Users are asked to provide their email address when submitting suggestions. They can choose to provide it or not.
• Email capture required: Users are asked to provide their email address when submitting suggestions. They have to provide it.

Feature voting and comments are always available without an email being set, regardless of the email capture setting.

Public board URL

You can choose a URL, on which the public board will be available on FeatureCat. We recommend choosing one that resembles your product’s name or brand (e.g. appity, if your product is called Appity, which will make the public board available on https://appity.featurecat.app).

Be mindful about choosing the URL - you can change it later, but it will break all existing links to the public board. We recommend choosing a URL that you can stick with for the long term.

User comments

Users can leave comments on features, if you enable the feature. Since comments are public, you should be mindful about moderating what is being posted. FeatureCat offers three options for comments:

• Comments disabled: Users can’t leave comments on features.
• Comments auto-approved: Users can leave comments on features, which are automatically approved and visible to everyone. You can still reject comments manually.
• Comments moderated manually: Users can leave comments on features, which are not visible to everyone until you approve them.

As a general rule, we recommend enabling comments, as they are a great way to gather additional feedback and context from your users. If you are worried about moderation, you can start with auto-approving comments, and switch to manual moderation if you feel like it is necessary.

As discussed above, you can also choose whether to display full attribution (name), a redacted name for privacy, or no attribution at all (anonymous). You have to pass the user’s name to FeatureCat when authenticating them, so that we can display it on the public board; otherwise all comments will be displayed as anonymous.

User authentication

To enable users to interact with the public board, you have to authenticate them with FeatureCat. This is done by passing a unique user ID to FeatureCat, which is then used to identify the user. Learn how to integrate the public board and authenticate your users in the next article on integration.