Updates to the Send-A-Smile tool

Microsoft

Collecting feedback and making it actionable is an important component of listening to our customers. This is why we put the Send feedback “smiley face” button directly on the browser toolbar for Microsoft Edge insider channels. If you run into a problem, something isn’t the way you like, you have a great suggestion, or you’d like to tell us something you enjoy, we’d love to hear from you!

Since the initial launch of the Canary and Developer channels, we’ve been listening to feedback on feedback (very meta) and we’ve made numerous improvements that we’d like to tell you about.

 

Cropping, marking up, and redacting screenshots

Our first big change in the feedback tool was to add new features to the screenshot capability.  You asked for the ability to crop and modify the contents of the screenshot to better highlight issues, and to ignore other portions of your desktop.  To begin addressing some of this feedback we have added the Screenshot editor that includes crop and pen tools.  As always, you are in total control of what you send to Microsoft, and must check the checkbox next to Include this screenshot, if you want to upload it with your feedback.

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Cropping

Clicking on the crop icon will switch into cropping mode. This allows you to select the region of the screenshot you’d like to crop to. Pressing Apply will crop the image and expand the resulting image to fill the available space.  Cancel will leave the image untouched. Once you return to the screenshot editor, you can undo and redo any changes.

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Marking up

The setting the color and width of the pen stroke. Pressing the pen button once selects the tool, and twice opens the dialog to set the options.

You can also use the pen to strike out information you don’t want to share with us, such as usernames and addresses. . You can also use it to call out regions of the screenshot, such as ringing an area, drawing an arrow, underlining, etc. If you switch to the red pen, you can feel like your former high school teacher!

For future tweaks to this tool, we’re considering adding a highlighter marker, so that you can markup without obfuscating the content behind.

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Additional diagnostics and attachments

We’ve overhauled the Diagnostic data user interface to provide customers further control of their data and additional capabilities. While a clear description of the problem you encounter helps, the cause can’t always be diagnosed by text and a screenshot alone. We give you the power to send diagnostics logs along with your feedback when you check the Send diagnostics data checkbox. This can be launched by clicking the Diagnostic data link in the feedback dialog.

A good example is when sync stops working as expected. The sync diagnostics logs may include the error code that we encountered, or the server that the data was syncing to. Similarly, if a video doesn’t play, then the media internals log will give details of the media engine. This can be especially important on sites behind a paywall that may be region specific.

 

Diagnostic logs

The first panel in the diagnostics data dialog lists all the logs that we collect. For each diagnostic log file, you’re able to view exactly what each log contains and toggle if that log is sent or not.

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Recreate my problem

Some classes of issues can be particularly tricky to diagnose. This is especially true of sites we don’t have access to. For these cases, we’ve added the Recreate my problem tool.

Switch to the Recreate my problem tab and check the consent checkbox. Once you click Start recording, switch back to the browser window (such as with Alt+Tab) and follow the steps required to exhibit the problem you’re reporting. When you’re done, return to the Diagnostics data dialog and stop recording. Behind the scenes, this will turn on heavy-weight logging that isn’t included in regular diagnostics logs.

In the future, we’re considering improving Recreate my problem by including additional screenshots or video, and additional log types.

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Attach file

Finally, we’ve added the ability to attach your own file. This is useful if you’re an advanced user that has already created your own log, or you want to add additional screenshots or images.

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Next Steps

We’re constantly reviewing the feedback we receive to see what we can add, remove, or improve. One of the things popping right now is to add the ability to manually add or remove the send feedback smiley face button from the toolbar. This is something we’ve just started working on. We’re also working on additional logs that will show up in diagnostics data.

We’re evaluating our user interface to see if we have the right balance between making the experience uncluttered and quick to fill out, versus the discoverability of more advanced or less frequently used features.

As always, if you’d like to give feedback, click on the smiley face, or open Settings and more (…), choose Help and feedback and then Send feedback. We’d like to know what you think!

25 Replies

I Love these features and have used them several times now. I personally like Mr. Smiley right where he is, one click away and no need to open the ... menu to get to it and no shortcut keys to have to hit. It's just a simple click and poof, it opens......

There is one area I'd like to see added to it and that is the "reproduce" section. As it stands now, when you are recording what you are reproducing and you mouse click buttons or what have you, nothing happens, there is no animation that shows "ok" that click has been recorded, unlike in the feedback hub when you preproduce something every time you click the mouse there is an animation at the spot you click, which says, ok this click has been recorded. Other than this I think all is great.

my20cents
Dennis5mile

can you paste into the screenshot editor? sometimes the thing I want to show isn't captured by the screenshot - it's a floating tool tip or it's in a pinned PWA - so I need to paste a screenshot I've already taken from the clipboard @Elliot Kirk 

A great new feature. Smiley need to be more happy now :)
I really like seeing these improvements, and the easy access to providing feedback, I wish Microsoft would implement such an easy way to give feedback to all their products (including first party games!)

@Mary Branscombe as a workaround, you can paste it into paint and then save it so you can attach it as a separate file.  

@Dennis5mile Thanks for the feedback! We're working on the experience for repro mode. We're planning on recording video (or similar) while you reproduce the issue. It is good feedback that we should include an indication when a user action happens. 

 

Filing the feedback via the smiley, if you haven't already, would be great too!

Thanks for the kind, positive feedback! I'll let the team know.

@Mary Branscombe you can't paste as of yet. As Josh mentioned, you can attach a file via the diagnostics data dialog. We'll evaluate if there is an easy way to amend the screenshot tool to support pasting. We do have a prototype that supports this. We want to keep the UI easy to use for the average user, while still supporting power users, so we need to design a way that is clear. Perhaps something on the context menu of the image for example?

Maybe something like the Windows feedback option that has a button you select to be able to paste something other than the auto captured screenshot?
while you're looking at the UI, the 'save and upload' button is rendering outside the border of the dialog for me so I can't click it, so I lose all my edits! if I expand the dialog the button continues to be outside the border of the dialog - it's pushed down so I can only see the top of the button and it's not clickable
@dstorey is there a keyboard shortcut for the save and upload button? needs that for accessibility (I tried ctrl-enter but it doesn't seem to work)

@Mary Branscombe there was an upstream change (to flexbox, I believe) that broke this. We're working on a work around as we speak, while we root cause it to see if it is a Blink regression or a spec change that was implemented recently). On my machine you can click the top of the button. Otherwise, you can use the tab key to get to the button and enter to submit.

Maybe it goes with screen res; I'm now at an age I have to crank Windows up to show things bigger! Suggestion - put the submit button up with the rest of the tools like crop and undo ;)
For Microsoft, I think it's very important to implement the same tools as it's at Microsoft Edge HTML, like the Reading List, Add Notes, Share & Tabs you have set a side. they are very important tools and get surprised that Microsoft Edge insider doesn't have it. Why ??
I like the name "Mr, Smiley" :D. Good post, I agree with you too.
@dstorey hang on, how do you attach the file? I see the text box, the URL field, the email address, the checkbox for diagnostic data and the checkbox to attach the screenshot. if there's an option to attach a file, there's nothing in the UI telling me that I can do that or how to do it.
I found it from this post, but FYI it is *not obvious* that you use diagnostic data to attach a file - diagnostic data sounds like things that are automatically created. I understand not wanting to overload the UI, but hidden behind a filing cabinet marked beware of the leopard isn't the way to do it!

@Elliot Kirk 

Is it possible to keep the diagnostic tab running even if Edge crashes. I had that problem when there was still a bug on Collections that would crash the browser when I clicked open all in new tab. The browser crashed, and the feedback tab crashed and quit recording too.

Is there any plans to add DNS over HTTPS like firefox and chrome are doing?