Uservoice, the online support and customer engagement company, has announced Touchpoint Toolkit, an in-app engagement toolkit for app developers.

As part of the release, Uservoice is introducing SmartVote:

“SmartVote is a new experience that we’ve built in order to leverage user feedback in a more meaningful way. Users choose between two previously suggested ideas and subscribe to updates on the ideas they’re interested in — all in a fun game-like format.”

It’s long been understood that pairwise comparison is a good way to establish which of a list of choices are more attractive, a much more effective technique than presenting the list and asking people to rate them or order them.

SmartVote accomplishes this in a simple model. First, users are shown two leading ideas:

Then, after selecting one, users are presented with more information and they can select that choice or go back:

Users can opt to follow ideas they are interested in.

Other aspects of the toolset include capturing sentiment analysis and providing help and feedback. And since it’s now offered as a toolkit, developers can choose how much of the suite to apply and where in their own app to integrate which capabilities.

I still think that we will be seeing a lot of SmartVote over the next few years.

And this is part another trend, too: social components that developers can add into apps, like Dropbox Chooser.