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Get Satisfaction on your iPhone App

View Comments 10 months, 25 days ago.

How do you give and receive feedback on iPhone applications?


Services like Uservoice and GetSatisfaction are the darlings of the web 2.0 mantra "we listen and love our customers". They enable your product to have a cute feedback tab that will encourage users to tell you what they think.

They work pretty well for web based services - but for the iPhone none of these services exist. Which is crazy when you consider a lot of users post feedback in the app store review - surely you'd want to offset the potential negative feedback:

Screen shot 2009-10-12 at 15.46.54

Imagine if that user had had the ability to send us that feedback inside the application, and we'd engaged the user and had a great discussion on what features he wanted and how and when we planned on implementing them.

We're in the process of creating a support centre - a manual and feedback system that allows users to learn about Broadersheet and communicate with us from within the iPhone application in a fantastic way. One of the options is Get Satisfaction Remote Component. It looks and feels awesome:

Get Satisfaction Viewer

Why wouldn't every application have this, right? Beccause it has a fatal flaw: Get Satisfaction requires you to register in order to give feedback or get support. It's somewhere between ridiculous and outrageous that they require this. Uservoice allows anonymous suggestions, and the best implementation of this particular "feature" is crowdstorm:

Screen shot 2009-10-12 at 17.09.04

Make suggestions as a guest, and ask them if they wish to sign up to keep track of the suggestion. It gets better with Get Satisfaction on the iPhone though - in order to login or sign up, you're kicked out of the application and into Mobile Safari. The most important thing in terms of feedback is data capture, and then ensuring you can manage the relationship with the user that has the problem. Not the other way around: if you make me register, I probably won't, then we both lose.

It doesn't seem far fetched for someone to create a proper iPhone-enabled view for these services that looks and feel gorgeous and integrates perfectly for developers.