We recently announced that our v2 feedback widget is now available for all our customers.
In this post I’m sharing some details of the improvements we made.
The improvements we made fall into two categories:
- User interface improvements
- Performance improvements
In this article, I’ll go into detail about the user interface improvements.
Our v2 widget remembers
Sometimes a user starts filling in your site’s feedback form, but gets distracted and accidentally closes the feedback form. No longer does that mean the info is lost. When a user opens the form again the content is there, right as they left it. They can even close the browser, lose power, restart the computer. Our form has a good memory!
(If you are a techie, and curious about how we did this, the answer is browser “local storage”. On each keystroke we update local storage with a copy of the form’s data. These days the support for local storage is solid across all major browsers. The data never leaves the user’s computer until the press the “Send feedback” button so it respects privacy too.)
Our v2 widget likes the keyboard
I’m into keyboard shortcuts, so I notice when keyboard conventions are not respected. We were doing pretty well overall with Saber Feedback with regard to keyboard conventions, but there’s one keyboard shortcut that wasn’t working the way it commonly does: the escape key was not closing the feedback form. The only way to close the feedback form without clicking “Send feedback” was to click the close icon with the mouse.
Our v2 widget has fixed this. You can now close the feedback form by pressing the escape key.
Of course, it is easy to press escape by mistake when tired or distracted. But because our v2 widget remembers what you have entered, there’s nothing lost if you press escape and didn’t mean to.
Our v2 widget is less susceptible to leaking CSS
I don’t know how to describe this improvement with a short phrase. So I’ll try to explain. You use CSS to make your website look great. We also use CSS to make our widget look great. Unfortunately sometimes our CSS was leaking into your website’s CSS. And sometimes a website’s CSS was leaking into ours.
“Leaking” is not a perfect description of what happens, but I feel it captures the essence of what was happening. It meant our widget didn’t always look as good as we meant it to.
We’ve spent recent months hunting down these occurrences one at a time. We’ve now got to the current situation with our v2 widget where it plays nicely with every website we’ve tried it on.
Those are the major UI improvements. Highly observant people will notice a couple of other small touches, too!
Want to start using our v2 widget? Learn how to install our V2 widget here.