Building a Custom FAQ App for Your Enterprise iOS Users

Our IT office at the Department of State is in the process of transitioning the majority of our mobile users from BlackBerry devices to iPhones and iPads over the next month. In preparation for the upgrade, our customer support team developed a frequently asked questions (FAQ) document that contained several tips and tricks to help users make the transition to iOS.

The original plan was to provide this document to users in paper form when they picked up their new iPhones but that didn’t feel like a very modern or effective way to distribute the information. Users would be unlikely to carry the paper with them all the time and it would be much more effective to have the information with them on their devices at all times. I suggested that we develop a universal iOS app that would contain the FAQs and could be preloaded onto each user’s device through their configuration profile when they logged into their phone for the first time. This would also be easier to update with new information over time so that we could add new FAQs as we received questions from users.

I built the app to function as a template so that the framework could be reused and rebranded for other purposes within State. The app is written in Swift and the UI is fairly simplistic, consisting of a single UIPageViewController that displays one FAQ per page. There is also an FAQ index that allows users to jump between FAQs easily. The FAQ page controller contains a UIWebView, which loads an HTML file that contains the FAQ display. The HTML can be loaded either from within the app’s bundle or from a remote URL. The FAQ list is generated from FAQs.plist file in the app bundle so that it’ll be easy to repurpose this app for other purposes.

Using HTML files for the FAQ document format has several benefits. First, it makes the process of creating the FAQ displays super simple and allows for our web team to help keep the content updated. Second, it becomes very simple to build a responsive display of the content. This needed to be a universal app that would run on both iPhones and iPads and I’ve used Bootstrap to make the FAQ files render properly on both devices as shown below.

iPad Responsive View

iPhone Responsive View

I’ve published the app on Github and have released the source code under the MIT license. I could see a lot of companies and government agencies using this for distributing internal training and reference content and I hope others find it useful. You can download the app at the URL below:

https://github.com/AcuityInfoMgt/MobileFAQ

I plan on deploying the app in its current form and gathering user feedback before making improvements but I already have a few in mind including:

• Enabling full text searching
• Adding the ability to open a help desk ticket from a mobile device
• Analytics to track which FAQs are viewed the most