Redesigning the way we “Help” !
Ever wondered the impact of contact us page for your website? It’s huge ! Your contact us page is like a temple for your website to which your customers visit to seek help , give feedback , rant about things not going well !
About the Project :
Big Shop is a giant retail store whose market is widely spread across the globe. The website as well as the company is well matured but in recent times the team figured out that calls per order is getting increased for one of the market and hence impacting a lot on business.
My Role : As a product designer my role was to come up with a solution which will help customers to navigate across the site hassle free !
Let’s get started!
The first thing I want to do is identify the UX design process, and define each stage before going into more detail throughout the case study. Take a look at the graphic below to get an idea of the outline I followed throughout this process:
🔎 Discover :
Secondary research :
I along with my content strategist, product manager we started with some insights which we got from our desk research through various articles, general observation, finding out the gaps in the current design and some new features we want to implement as a part of new design.
Insight 1 : Better information design in order for the users to locate what they need & discover other information they may want.
Insight 2 : Help users quickly access relevant information which helps them find relevant solutions to their problem
Insight 3: Optimise the page for visual scanning
Apart from this we also did a competitive analysis to understand the market trends :
To get started with things, we went to the local researcher of that market and along with her help we got even more insights. Below are the details of the same :
Primary Research :
This was conducted using User testing tool with a group of 8–10 people considering the time constraint. Below are the insights we got post the interview session :
📌 “Seeking Help” was not at the favourite part of the customer
📌 Chatbots were not helpful giving them desired result.
📌 They were stuck in a constant loop of lot of texts and repetitive links.
📌 Customers were looking for agents to call upfront. But all numbers were hidden.
📌 Regarding communication live chat was the most desired option for the customers.
📌 The site is considered as very crowded and searching becomes a cumbersome task.
✍🏻 Define
Redefining the Problem statement :
How might we help the customers to resolve their queries asap? || Simple ||
The design Thinking Workshop :
Duration : 2 days
Participant : content strategist , design colleagues from similar domain
We conducted a small design thinking workshop with our in house designers to understand the problem statement better and come up with a diverse set of solutions.
And it went like …..
User journey Mapping :
We started with multiple scenarios, some of them were : returns journey, knowing about return policy , applying promo codes. In the journey mapping we went ahead with applying promo codes.
Once our user journey was created we had the idea about what kind of problem we are trying to solve here so we went ahead and had our crazy 8 brainstorming session
Post our crazy 8 we asked the participants to sketch of what they had created and we went for a dot voting method to come up with the solution.
Ideas we explored :
👉🏻 Clear and direct content. Try to keep it summarized instead of repeating questions.
👉🏻 Let us segregate everything topic wise, we can also try making it more personalized.
👉🏻 Chatbot should be smart enough to answer most of the queries and hence encouraging people for more self help rather than looking for agents to call.
👉🏻 Help should be across and not just on one single page.
👉🏻 Reduce the options rather than showcasing too many links redirecting to the same page again and again.
From the above the solutions we got, we decided to start building things in the wireframe format.
Develop
Prototyping :
We started with creating wireframes, a lot of rough ones started with paper sketching. and then created a basic structure :
We have created multiple types of prototypes, very rough sketching I am presenting the cleanest ones 😛
Once the prototyping was done we moved ahead to the solution part. We started creating low fidelity mockups and started exploring more and more options :
🫠 And then we explored even more :
🎯 And at the end we finalised this design :
What problems are resolved from this solution ?
🎯 Now the focus is more on the chat window rather than calling option.
🎯 All the most important informations are mentioned right upfront.
🎯 In mobile view access to numbers are easy. All the numbers are underlined which gives the impression that they can easily call at their respective domains.
🎯 We tried to showcase that calling might be a difficult task for the customer because they had to wait for 2 min whereas for chat there is no wait time.
Key Takeaways :
Your assumptions might be completely different from customer’s expectations.
We should not hide important details from the customers “Dark UX” is a red flag for your customers ! Stay away !
Throughout this project there was a lot of emphasis on Accessibility because of which I got the opportunity to work on my accessibility skills and hence clear a certification known as “ IAAP CPACC Certificate”. Across the globe there are some 4K people certified with this. 😎
🔮 Future Scope :
In my opinion I don’t think we should rely completely on Contact us page. We should make our website in such a manner that customers can get help wherever it is needed.
With AI and everything coming into picture we should encourage customers to use new age technology and get their queries resolved in no time.
I know I know at the begining of this article I told Contact us page is like a temple bla bla ! But don’t you think just like god is everywhere to help you out, similarly your help section should be available across your website to help your customers out….
With this thought I’ll leave you here ! If you like to know more about this project feel free to get in touch !
