Use a Web page for your iOS App's Help Center

May 15, 2014

As our ambition is to deliver the highest levels of customer service for people who use our iPhone App Connect to manage their contacts, we've considered to bring a Help Center within the app in addition to our existing email & phone support.

One of our main concerns was about to be sure we would be able to update when necessary. In other words, we wanted to be independent of the AppStore submission process. So we basically end up to set up a Webview so the Help & Support content are actually on a Web page that can be updated at any time. Here's the result

We made a HTML page with a design integrated with the app, then integrate

Simple responsive HTML page

We built a basic responsive HTML page that can fit with every iPhone screen sizes. We did not want to overload the screens so we decided to only display titles and questions, and add open sections with JQuery (that remind the global native UX).

This way, users can fastly identify which section talks about their problem. That was important for us to be sure that users who need to be supported can find frictionless answers quickly.

Display the page in your app

It's quite simple to display Web pages directly in your app without opening up Safari, so your users stay in your app. You can do it thanks to a powerful UIKit component called UIWebView. Here's basically how it looks like in XCode:

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@synthesize webView;

- (void)dealloc{
      [webView release];
      [super dealloc];
}

- (void) viewDidLoad{
      NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://www.domain.com/help-page"];
      NSURLRequest *requesURL = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:url];
      [webView loadRequest:requestURL];

      [super viewDidLoad];
}

@end
                  

Here's also a great video tutorial where you can learn to do so.

Get source code

The source code for the HTML Web page is available for free on Github. Feel free to use this Web page template in your own apps. We have positive feedback from our users, they feel the page is well integrated with the rest of the app!

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