Implementing Uninstall Feedback with Inno Setup

There are problems in your software!

Otherwise your “demo installations / orders” ratio must be 100%, is it? If it’s 100% don’t read this post and write your own one about how you achieved this.

People are lazy and they will hardly write you by e-mail about problems they have with your program. They likely will remove your software from computer and will start evaluate a competitor’s product. The only chance to receive feedback from such users is to grab their attention during uninstall process.

There are many posts and discussions about how to properly implement the uninstall feedback. I’d like to write about our own experience. This is how the uninstall feedback is made in Dr.Explain - a rapid help authoring software.

Our setup program is made with Inno Setup.

We simply added the following code in the [code] section of .iss file:

[Code]
…
procedure DeinitializeUninstall();
var
ErrorCode: Integer;
begin
if MsgBox(’Why are you removing ProductName software? ‘ #13#13 ‘Would you like to answer, please?’, mbConfirmation, MB_YESNO) = idYes then
ShellExec(’open’, ‘http://www.yourdomain.com/unistallform.php’, ”, ”, SW_SHOWNORMAL, ewNoWait, ErrorCode);
end;

As you see, this hook opens a web form on the product website in browser. Many users don’t like when applications run browsers without their confirmation. So, we have to ask first if a user wants to open the uninstall feedback form.

This simple trick helped us gather valuable feedback from people and even to close several sales with those initially “unhappy” users.

Below there is a couple of related links about other ways of implementing uninstall feedback in Inno Setup:
More proactive way to force the user to write the feedback
Uninstall Survey plug-in for Inno Setup