Requesting a feature

Feature Requests in your sidebar is a shared ideas board. Every artist using Maelo posts to the same one and votes on the same list, so what you see is not your own wishlist, it is what everybody wants, ranked.

The board does three things and no more: you vote on an idea, you read where it stands, and you post your own. That is the whole screen. Along the top are tabs for All, Open, Planned, In Progress and Completed, each with a count, plus search and a sort control.

The arrow on the left of each card is the vote. Tap it and the idea moves up the board, and tap it again to take your vote back. Nothing is locked in, so vote generously on the way past.

Votes are the ranking, and the most wanted ideas are the ones looked at first. This is the part artists skip and it is the part that matters most: an idea with forty votes behind it is a decision, while an idea with one is an opinion. If somebody has already asked for the thing you want, voting for theirs helps more than posting a second copy of it.

Every idea carries a badge, and it is the honest answer to whether anything is happening.

• •Open, the idea is on the board and has been seen. It has not been committed to.
• •Planned, it is on the roadmap and will get built.
• •In Progress, somebody is building it now.
• •Completed, it has shipped. Check whether it is already in your app before you ask for it.
• •Declined, it is not going to be built. There is usually a reply on the idea explaining why.

Tap Suggest Feature in the header, or the plus button on your phone. The form asks for a Title and an optional Description, and that is it.

Search the board first. If your idea is already there in some form, adding your vote and a comment on the existing one puts weight behind it, while a duplicate splits the votes between two cards and makes both look less wanted than they are.

A clear title and a couple of lines of context is plenty. The useful thing to include is not the solution you imagined but the situation you are in, because the situation is what somebody can design against.

Compare "add a bulk edit button" with "I run a flash day and have to turn thirty designs unavailable one at a time". The first is a button. The second tells you what the day actually looks like, and it might get solved a better way than the one you had in mind.

Keep it to one idea per post. Three requests stacked into a single card can only be voted on as a bundle, which means the useful one gets held back by the other two.

Open any idea to read it in full and add a comment. Comments are where an idea gets sharper: another artist describing how it plays out in their shop is often what turns a vague ask into something obvious.

When the team replies to an idea it appears at the top of it as an Official Response, marked so you can tell it apart from artist comments. That is where you will find out why something moved to Planned, or why it was declined.

New to the board? The ellipsis menu in the header has Show me around, which points out the vote, the status badge and the form without changing anything.