So we are very proud to announce our latest project for FACTOR. We built their original online applications system back in 2004 and last Wed we launched the latest and greatest version of the system. We are super stoked about this new version since we got to take the last 3 years of feedback and experience and roll it into this new version. The feedback so far has been really positive and they have had 230 applications started in the past 5 days. Over the next week I will be highlighting some of the cool features starting with the feedback form.
Feedback form
So one of the big things we didn’t want to have to do with this project is spend a lot of time creating help documentation before we launched, instead we wanted real user demand to drive the help. So we place a simple feedback button on every page of the application and in our invite and correspondence emails we always mention it as the best way to get help, or make suggestions. This feedback function not only sends us an email but gives us a dump of all the users information so we can help them faster.
Here is a sample email
This is a help request from user@testing.com
Who says...
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Please help me Ryan!
From user...
{"company"=>"Company Name", "city"=>"Toronto", "country"=>"Canada", "id"=>360, "is_jury_member"=>false, "telephone"=>"(519)890-9164", "first_name"=>"Ryan", "last_name"=>"Marcone"
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Their session is as follows...
{:user_name=>"RyanMcMinn", :language=>"english", :app_id=>747, :locale=>"en-US", :user_id=>360}
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And the environment variables...
{"SERVER_NAME"=>"###", "PATH_INFO"=>"/web/process_help_request", "CONTENT_LENGTH"=>"300", "HTTP_CONTENT_TYPE"=>"application/x-www-form-urlencoded", "HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING"=>"gzip,deflate", "HTTP_USER_AGENT"=>"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.2) Gecko/20070219 Firefox/2.0.0.2", "SCRIPT_NAME"=>"/", "SERVER_PROTOCOL"=>"HTTP/1.1", "HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE"=>"en-us,en;q=0.5", "HTTP_HOST"=>"###", "REMOTE_ADDR"=>"74.114.202.243", "SERVER_SOFTWARE"=>"Mongrel 0.3.13.2", "HTTP_CONTENT_LENGTH"=>"300", "HTTP_KEEP_ALIVE"=>"300", "CONTENT_TYPE"=>"application/x-www-form-urlencoded", "HTTP_REFERER"=>"###", ... and more
So now when I get the email I know; all their user info, which application they are working on, what URL they made the request from, their browser and OS. This makes support so much easier because I can test out their issue in their environment before I get back to them and I don’t need to follow up with the standard questions about their setup or where they were when they had a problem.
I really think that the initial user support experience can make or break your application and tools like this allow us to make our clients users more productive and successful.