Amidst all the craze of WWDC, we had the pleasure of hosting the Airbrake + Exceptional One-Star event this week at the new Atlassian office in San Francisco. Our very own Chris LePetit joined a great lineup of speakers – including great speakers from Shazam, Intercom, The Growl Project and more – to speak about changes in customer service and Jira Mobile Connect.
It was awesome to see lots of people really focused on getting user feedback to improve the quality of their apps. I spoke to Brad Leege, a current JMC user, who expressed immense gratitude for having a simple way for his developers to engage with his mobile users to make their app better.
Since Jira Mobile Connect is steadily making its way into more and more mobile apps, I thought I’d share a bit about how those apps get better as a result.
Getting feedback in hands of your developers
The first step in making changes for the better is really about getting the right information in the hands of the right people – your developers. Brad did this by updating the “Contact UW Mobile Team” button on the about screen of their Mobile UW app.
In addition to capturing metrics on the type of device (os, model number, etc) for better ability to test and resolve the user’s issue, it went straight into Jira, where all developers were tracking their work already.
This not saved Brad the time of manually creating issues in Jira, it provided every developer with the ability to follow up directly with that user without having to switch to email or another tool.
I really like that for the app’s end user it’s a seamless UI that doesn’t kick them out to email. From the developer’s perspective I like that it automatically goes into Jira (which keeps me from having to hand enter issues from email)
Brad Leege, Mobile UW Team, University of Wisconsin – Madison
Getting it right from the beginning
- Trendslide Graphs
When Trendslide recently added Jira Mobile Connect to their application to collect user feedback, they started getting 5-6 items of feedback each week. And the impact of this feedback was immediate.
If you’re not familiar with Trendslide, the app visualises different kinds of trends, from Twitter to Google Analytics, with a slick graph (see left). The problem they didn’t realize they had was that people opening the app for the first time had no clue what each colored line represented, so they ended up ditching it.
With the addition of Jira Mobile Connect, this problem was brought to their attention by several users and they quickly added a welcome screen to get people up to speed right away:
Getting your developers connected with your users
Jira Mobile Connect allows us to collect deep, rich feedback from users, including logs and screenshots, and to track and respond to them in a systematic manner. Mobile Connect’s integrated messaging allows us to communicate with users from within the app, without the need to resort to external channels.
Parand Tony Darugar, Xpenser
If you haven’t already, check out Jira Mobile Connect today and start leveraging direct user feedback to build better apps. It’s free for anyone using Jira and available with Atlassian OnDemand.
