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Please add a top-level forum for general feature requests and ideas for Garmin products

FlowState
3 months ago

For 10+ years, Garmin forum members have been making feature requests in the forums, and for all those years, their fellow forum members and Garmin employees have advised them to use the official Garmin Ideas page, which is a one-way private form with no possibility of feedback or acknowledgement from Garmin.

Instead of that, what would be really great is something akin to the Spotify community ideas page: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Ideas/ct-p/newideas

You know, a place where users can post ideas, have members of the community vote on them and post comments, and where Garmin employees can actually communicate with the public regarding said features.

I think it's very valuable that users post feature requests in these forums anyway, as it gives us all a way to see which features are widely requested (or which have been requested for 10+ years).

To me, the biggest irony is that you when you post a topic on any of the "bug report" forums, the form refers to submitting an "idea".

And ofc, users are able to vote and comment on ideas I mean bug reports. Ideas bug reports also have a status that can be set by Garmin employees, who often comment on the Ideas bug reports themselves.

Obviously the support exists in the platform, but Garmin as a company needs to be willing to actually officially entertain feature requests in their forums. I'd be happy even if Garmin just opened an Ideas forum where they let users post, vote and comment on each others ideas, with no interaction from Garmin, but with the understanding that Garmin would look at these ideas with the same attention and care that they'd give to ideas submitted on the existing Ideas page (which ofc would be no longer necessary). But ofc it would be a much appreciated bonus if Garmin would also engage with users on feature requests in this new forum.

I just think that today in order to get the most "mileage" out of a feature request, users have to post it in two places (the forums and the official ideas page), and the post on forums will inevitably lead to a response of "you should post this on the idea page".)

It doesn't seem right to me.

If all feature requests were only posted in the "correct place", then we wouldn't know that users have been asking for mixed metric and imperial units in Connect for over 10 years, for example.

  • 0 3 months ago

    I can raise this as a suggestion. I suspect the reason this doesn't exist is because we'd likely get an overwhelming number of suggestions that we could never respond to them all in any meaningful way. I don't know myself what happens to the official Garmin suggestion box (https://www.garmin.com/en-US/forms/ideas/).

    Regarding Connect IQ bug reports, the reason is says "Submit an Idea" is because we use a forum "Ideation" tool to collect bug reports because it's the only thing available to us to collect external reports. I don't have any way to change this text without custom work from the vendor as far as I'm aware. Its actual intent is to collect ideas, just as you're proposing.

    FWIW, this is a bit of a sore subject for me because I have been working for several years to make some other bug reporting tool available because the ideation form toll isn't ideal. My hope was to have some kind of external JIRA, like a JIRA service desk (we use JIRA internally) where developers could submit bugs and we could more easily track issues internally and provide feedback and more accurate status on those external tickets. That has not been possible for various reasons (mostly security limitations).

    I don't offer any of this as an excuse, but simply to explain that I have actively tried to improve this half-measure "Ideation" solution for collecting bug reports and would like something more suited to the purpose, too.

  • 0 3 months ago in reply to Brandon.ConnectIQ
    Brandon.ConnectIQ said:
    I suspect the reason this doesn't exist is because we'd likely get an overwhelming number of suggestions that we could never respond to them all in any meaningful way.

    That's fair, but as I mentioned, I would personally be ok if we had an ideas forum as a substitute for the current form, where users could comment and vote, with the understanding that Garmin would read (but not respond) to the ideas.

    Brandon.ConnectIQ said:
    Regarding Connect IQ bug reports, the reason is says "Submit an Idea" is because we use a forum "Ideation" tool to collect bug reports because it's the only thing available to us to collect external reports. I don't have any way to change this text without custom work from the vendor as far as I'm aware. Its actual intent is to collect ideas

    Yeah, that's what I gathered. I was just sorta ruminating on the irony of using the forum platform's "ideas" tool to collect bug reports, while actual ideas (feature requests) are verboten in the forums.

    Every time someone posts a feature request, there's the inevitable "Garmin won't read this, post to the garmin ideas page" response. Yes, that's true, but I will always defend the value of making feature requests known to the community at large.

    If people didn't publicly post feature requests, I wouldn't know there's a missing feature I want in Connect that others have also wanted for over a decade.

    Brandon.ConnectIQ said:
    My hope was to have some kind of external JIRA

    That would be great!

  • 0 3 months ago

    my thoughts:

    - I think that having 2 separate forums for bug reports and feature requests would be better

    - Even if the pinned post in the feature requests forum would state we'll not get a response from Garmin. One "side effect" of seing what others ask for and the ability to up-vote is to see "I'm not alone"

    - For the external Jira or other tool: I'm not sure what "security limitations" means, but consider 2 things: 1. attlassian themselves have this kind of internal vs external jira. It might be worth to ask them about it. 2. if security means that Garmin employees would accidentally comment on an issue in the external jira project (thinking they are in the internal project) and write something they shouldn't have then maybe the less convenient but more secure solution would be to chose a different tool (I'm sure it's not hard to find 10 others) that looks different, so less chance they get confused.

  • 0 3 months ago in reply to flocsy🤠

    I want to clarify one thing—the topic of this thread is about a more generic feature request tool, but within the Connect IQ developer forums, we accept both bug reports and feature requests through the bug reporting tool. Perhaps I can clarify that in the FAQ and elsewhere. In many cases, feature requests may also be considered bugs (e.g. some Activity.Info member that isn't available to CIQ apps but is available in native activities). For Connect IQ, at least, I'd prefer to have one place for developers to submit bugs and requests to keep it simple.

  • 0 3 months ago in reply to Brandon.ConnectIQ

    Ok, I think this is the 1st semi official recognition of Garmin considering some of the CIQ related feature requests Slight smile

  • 0 3 months ago

    This is the negative attitude I am talking about when it comes to users posting feature requests in the public forums:

    Most ppl usually don't say this outright. They usually just say that you should post to the ideas page and *imply* you shouldn't have posted in the forums. But the implication is usually there.

    I personally think the community would be worse if ppl never posted feature requests. And it would be better if there was a forum that was officially meant for the purpose of posting feature requests, even if Garmin never responds there.