User Centric: Shake to support

Sanit Jain describes in his blog the importance of user centric IT . One of the components is the Feedback Shake. This has been in use for nearly 3 years now and continues to provide a valuable user experience not only for the end user, but for the support team. Google also included similar features in its consumer applications.

Ensuring that the support team can more easily help the end user is essential. The feedback shake enhances this by including log and config details in addition to a screenshot in the data provided.

I showed this in action at Mastering SAP in Melbourne in 2014:

However don’t shake your PC:

Usage

If an app with feedback shake is running and you shake the device you will see the following screen.This gives the option to Send Feedback or Share with Friends. It’s not in the example here but we also have an option of direct integration into our IT Ticketing system.

Send Feedback

This option sends a feedback email to a distribution list (includes developers).

The email captures device (not user) specific details, a screenshot (the large grey area below) and also attaches data from the device log file.

Share with friends

Recommendations are a great way to enhance app adoption. Adding a share with friends email template was a simple way for us to achieve this, especially when including a link to install the app from the Enterprise App Store.

Sample Project

To be able to share the code I put together a sample XCode project created with XCode 7.3 . This is just an example for reference.

GitHub – jastill/ShakeForSupport: Example iOS code for Shake for Support