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Asked: 2026-05-11T14:24:36+00:00

ok, Bugzilla would scare the willies out of the average end-user. Even things like

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ok, Bugzilla would scare the willies out of the average end-user. Even things like Mantis are a little spooky for the uninitiated.

What method, web package (preferred), interface, whatever can I implement to make it easy, intuitive and not-at-all-intimidating for my end users & customers to report bugs in an intelligible manner?

I like the idea of something forms-based, or point-and-clicky, rather than the prior knowledge needed by something as comprehensive and intimidating as Bugzilla.

Email, while approachable for the average punter, seems less than ideal since it doesn’t prompt the user for the kinds of information I need to try & figure out what is broken.

So far Bugs – The Bug Genie seems like the least scary option to confront the average user with. I searched but didn’t find any questions like mine.

Suggestions, ideas, insights please !

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  1. You’re absolutely right – it’s not up to the user to use bugzilla. that’s for devs.

    Error reporting from the user side needs to be really simple if you expect users to use it. (ie. When I see the ‘report this bug to MS’ i usually hit cancel even though it’s a one-click mechanism.)

    It’s also not just about you getting the info you need to track the bug, it’s also about making the user feel like something’s being done, like they’re being taken care of, so keep that in mind.

    As a result of all this, I’d go with whatever bug tracking package suited you as a developer and then feed into that from a nice, simple, friendly web-form interface built specifically for your end users.

    Then when an error occurs, try to only ask the user questions you can’t answer programatically. Ideally, your exception handling should already track their current action (saving an invoice), current context (invoice screen), the entity being acted upon(invoice #10013), and all the exception info from the program. If you can’t capture this and retrieve it remotely, feed it to your web form (in URL params or whatever) when the user clicks ‘report this issue’. Ensure you pay attention to any sensitive data requirements.

    Then you should only need to ask your users the human questions like – ‘How can we best contact you about this issue?’ (method / times / etc.), and give them an idea of how long it’ll take for them to get a response from a human.

    I realise this doesn’t offer a software recommendation, but hopefully it’s still good advice for handling your issue.

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