Hey guys I made this feedback widget for one of my apps because I was getting annoyed with posting promo codes in forums and spamming my friends for feedback on my apps. One of my friends said maybe it'd be something other people could use too - so I cleaned up the code and made it into a plugin. It's basically a table view with a submit box and thumbs up/down buttons. I added some simple game mechanics where users can earn feedback votes when they play the game to try to motivate people to leave feedback and let the people that played the game the most have more influence. I'll probably add features like skinning so you can customize it for your apps and stuff. Do you guys think this would be useful to keep working on? You can check it out here: http://www.crittercism.com
Looks cute and functional, but I don't understand the idea of points... I'm guessing that you want to limit feedback to those who have used the app, but IMHO it's annoying and counterproductive. 1) They get hit with a notification number, which goes away only if they use the points. 2) It can be hard enough to get someone to spend the time to provide feedback, now they have to earn points to do so. By making them earn points, you lose out on people who might want to report something immediately (before they've earned points...) That, and most developers usually include a link to their website, which often has a feedback/email link - you'd only get business from small devs without their own sites (who would be less likely to pay for such a thing.) My 2 cents: I am not a developer, nor do I play one on TV.
Hey thanks for the feedback! You brought up some good points (wow sorry about the puns) 1) A lot of the functionality can be customized by the developer - so things like the notification number is optional. You can have it displayed more or less prominently or not at all. I think it can have the same purpose as a progress bar - where it'll be noticeable enough to get them to use their feedback points. 2) You can also customize how many points a new user starts with, so even before they use your app they can give you feedback and vote on feedback. Another option is whether or not a user is required to have votes to add a feedback item or if they just need votes to hit thumbs up/down. You're right a lot of developers have websites with links to send them email, but I think it takes too much effort - you have to close the app, go to the website and send them an email whereas you could just do it within the app itself.
Would this mainly be used in BETA testing? I think it is a good idea, but perhaps you could put it as an option in the menu instead or maybe even inside the options/more section. I feel like if they have the game, and they touch the feedback option in the menu/options/more they have already played the game and are now exploring. I wouldn't want it mid game play for my users but rather AFTER. To me this would alleviate the fear that they opened the game and the first thing they did before they even played the game was touch feedback to tell you they hate paying .99 cents for a game. I'm with drelbs in regards to the points. Perhaps there is another way you can go about that idea. Personally I would be most interested to know if things are going wrong in the game. You can't please everyone and some people will stop playing a game for the most asinine reasons like "I don't like the color green and the background of this puzzle game is green so I deleted it and it sucked" what I would be most worried about is glitches not caught in testing. If your plug-in could present the user with a prompt in the feedback area saying please select type of feedback: report a problem or report feedback would be great so when I go log in and check my data I can organize the "wonderful color scheme" and "your app crashes when I get a text message" and thus work on the most important things first... catching what was missed in original development. (this is assuming average users actually read... which is probably a small percent now that I really think about it...) Anyways, good idea
I'm not a dev, but I know the internet, and I can tell you that it is not expensive at all to have your own website. There are tons of free hosts/blogs around (some with extremely generous packages, and free blog hosts with literally unlimited traffic), and a custom domain/web address is only 6 dollars a year. If the dev can afford the $99 fee to publish their app, they can afford less than 2 cents a day. There's no excuse to not have your own website when you are in a business.
Thanks! It can be used both during Beta testing and while it's in production - the cool part is you can use the crittercism website to turn the widget on/off at any time without having to submit an update to the app store. It's pretty flexible where you can add the feedback option - so you could put it in the menu or more hidden under an options menu, or you could even pop up an alert when the user has played a certain number of times so you don't get the haters leaving you useful feedback. Yeah, a lot of people have been telling me it'd be the most useful to get users to tell you about bugs - thinking about adding a feature where you could have separate lists for bug reports and feature requests. Cool, thanks again for your input!
Beta! Hey guys The library is alive! If anyone wants an invite code to the private beta either reply to this thread or send me a private message. Cheers Rob
