The Project
Like so many other products,
Appygram was created to alleviate a pain point we kept hitting in our custom web and mobile app development projects: routing messages.
Our apps - and the users of our apps - needed to be able to communicate a variety of things to us and our fellow team members: app-generated messages to notify us when something needs attention; user-generated messages to ask questions, let us know when something goes wrong, to give us love and praise, and more. We also had requirements to prompt users for feedback, using products like Net Promoter Score.
Then there's the other half of the equation - where to send all these messages? Because they don't all go to the same place. For example, with our restaurant apps, we wanted anything marked "app" to go to us, but if a user had a question about their order or the restaurant in general, those topical messages should skip us and go right to the client's customer service reps. Depending on the project, we like to receive messages in a variety of ways: email, in our Campfire chat room, as a GitHub issue, or as an Assembla ticket. Our clients have their own requirements for email notifications and help desk integrations. And both the topics and the routings had to be able to be updated without redeploying the app.
And so Appygram was born.
Appygram handles messages from web and mobile apps. Use it where you would otherwise put a custom coded feedback or support form, embed a dedicated widget for a particular support service, or provide a simple email link. Appygram provides a much more flexible and capable alternative. It's super easy to implement, works within your user experience, and is both reliable and economical.
The Work
The Appygram secret sauce includes some of the following ingredients:
- Ruby on Rails
- Heroku
- Google App Engine
- SendGrid
The Partners
Alison Heittman, Rob Heittman, Carl Scott, Will Laurance, Jill Zimmerman, Solertium, dubsoft, Jill's Design Market