We have an ongoing problem with customer portal usability. I've searched the forums and I'm surprised this issue hasn't come up before.
End users can only create new incidents or feature requests, but not defects. If an incident is determined to be a bug, a support person will create a new defect, which then can be viewed in the customer portal. This eliminates bug reports that aren't really bugs, as well as dup bug reports, etc.
I'm sure this is a common way to set up OnTime, but it is not intituatuve or obvious to the end user in any way. When an end user logs in to the portal, all they see are thrre tabs: Defects, Features and Incidents. The logical thing for an end user to do is to click on the Report A New Bug icon, which is greyed out since end users can't create new defects.
At this point, the customer is lost. There's no indication why the icon is greyed out, and no way to know that they have to enter an incident instead. Some customers will contact us, but I imagine others simply give up in frustration and end up not reporting problems. This is not good - customers are already frustrated that they're having some problem and the mechanism for reporting problems shouldn't frustrate them even further.
IMO, this is a serious usability flaw in an otherwise good product. None of these icons should be greyed out. If customers don't have the ability to enter new defects, then clicking on that icon should being up a message to that effect, and that text should be customizable.
Ideally, there should also be an optional screen that comes up immediately after log-in, where instructions to the end user can be presented. This of course would need to be customizable as well.
I suppose I can work around this for now by adding some text to the login screen, but I dislike modifying the aspx pages unless it's absolutely necessary.
I've also had to modify the Add Defect page to add some instructions at the top. All of these pages should have the ability to add customized text at the top of the page, or ideally both at the top of the page and immediately before the submit buttons.
Maybe I've missed something, but I don't see any way to accompish these things without directly editing the .aspx pages.
Thanks.
Don