Spotlight: Legendary Support Form UX with Gravity Perks
See how we use our own spells to make our support form legendary for customers and support workflow alike.
Spotlight Function
Searchable, Auto-Updating
Product Drop Down
Spells Used
GP Advanced Select
GP Populate Anything
Include Static Choices (Snippet)
Add Object to Live Merge Tag Modifier (Snippet)
What’s the most effective way to streamline your support requests when you have over 60 products, each of these with different use cases, and to top it off, they can all be combined for further complexity?
That’s the question our wizards were faced with, which led to our support form jumping straight into the essentials:
- Which product is having an issue?
- What exactly is the issue?
- Space for additional information like a link to the form, screenshots, and even screencasts for trickier setups.
Drilling down the “what” and “where” of each problem is especially important for us because we support so many products. Not only that, each product can have wildly different applications by themselves, and even more when they’re combined.
So, in good wizard fashion, this unassuming form has some of our own magic pulling the strings behind the scenes to make support tickets as legendary as those you contact through them. 🪄
One Drop Down to Rule Them All
When filling out the form, customers can specify if their issue is with their account, a product, or a snippet.
If the issue is with a product—which is most of the tickets we get—a searchable “Which product?” drop down appears for customers to quickly find and select the product they are having trouble with.
This “Which product?” field is powered by GP Advanced Select, GP Populate Anything, and a few sorcerous snippets… Let’s break it down.
Searchable and Smooth
We have over 60 products—making GP Advanced Select’s search feature come in clutch for choice navigation here. Customers can easily search by any part of a product’s name, and see the options narrow down instantly.
Currently, we chose to only allow one product to be selected at a time. GP Advanced Select actually supports multi-select too—handy if we were ever to expand this field to allow for multiple products to be selected at a time.
Dynamic + Static Choices
To account for the entire Gravity Wiz spellbook, the “Which product?” drop down needs to:
- Include every single product we support.
- Keep up with new releases.
- Keep up with possible deprecations.
For that to be possible without a ton of duplicate manual entries from us (not very magical), Populate Anything pulls all of our products—stored as posts—directly from our download list, with a few is/is not filters in place to ensure it only populates products that are currently downloadable.
Additionally, there are a handful of Early Access plugins that are not present in our download list, but that we still provide support for. To bring them into this drop down, we use the Include Static Choices snippet.
How it works: with the snippet installed, we add the Early Access plugins as choices via the field settings, then add gppa-prepend-static-choices as a custom CSS class.
This is a quick way to accommodate edge cases like this, where a few choices are more modular in nature and not part of a bigger, more defined list you’re populating from.
Dynamic Pop-up with Auto-Updating Version Number
After selecting the product, a pop-up appears noting and linking to the latest version of the selected product. This creates a smooth first line of defense for our queue, asking a question often overlooked: “Is your plugin up to date?”
In play here are:
- A GP Populate Anything live merge tag referencing the “Which product?” field in real time.
- Another lovely snippet: Add Object to Live Merge Tag Modifier.
Why “lovely”? Because it’s preventing a second database call to pull that number—a total sweetheart.
How it works: When Populate Anything retrieves the posts to populate the drop down, it also fetches each post’s version number from post meta. The version number is then displayed next to the product name using a live merge tag with the :object modifier introduced by the snippet—like so: {@:2:object[_version_number]}.
The result? Faster response time for this convenient, actionable iteration of this important troubleshooting step.
The Magic is in the Details
This is the saga of the “Which product?” drop down. It makes the task of indicating the “what” and “where” seamless for our customers (namely you 😉)—and in turn, for us.
I asked Scott Ryer, our head of support and one of the wizards behind this form, for his takeaway on how helpful this feature has really been for our team:
Just in the past year, we would have had to update this [product] list at least eight times. If that doesn’t sound like a lot, the plugin version pop-up below would have had to be updated every week. Honestly, this is an insane UX feature only made possible by Populate Anything.
For the health of our queue, not only are we encouraging customers to double-check if their plugins are up-to-date, there are no product name typos (e.g. “Poopulate Anything” 💩). This avoids unnecessary confusion and makes auto-tagging of tickets possible—resulting in even faster response times.
Curious to see the results for yourself? Check out our revamped support page to see our real-time numbers—we’re super proud of how they speak for themselves. 🤭
If you have any questions, let us know in the comments—or through the support form (let them know Dani sent you, hehe). Cheers! ✨
Hungry for more certified wizard action? In Spotlight: Simple Event Communication with GP Email Users, we go through how we manage quick email correspondence for our live workshops.
