Context & background

Canon Australian has decided to move call centre team offshore and cut up 30% capacity as well in the following year, which means if the number of require remain same, we will have support shortage by that time. If we has online experience help customer self-help before they contact out support team, that will be ideal. So...

How can we improve the current "support" page to help customers find the answer they need, in order to mitigate the call centre costs?

I decided to start from the current "support" journey to understand what went well and what needs to improve to achieve the goal. So with this goal in mind, I decided to set up meetings with the customer service manager to get a better understanding of what issues our customers facing right now, and what are the most frequent questions than been asked by customers; Does customer visit the website before they call? etc...

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The result is quite surprising, we found that

"70% of the case was having trouble direct on the support page and failed to find the information they need"

Usability heuristic review has also conducted.

Discover practical solutions

And thinking to get the best practical solution for those issues, I decided to conduct a workshop of a group of people involved in this project, that comes from diverse backgrounds.

As a team, I let everyone map out a list of pain points that  I collected throughout the research, and ask them to draw their ideas on paper and present their ideas and designs and we vote to the best practice option on each pain point.

I gathered all these ideas and sketches out a paper prototype based on our discussions. Then, refine the flow, and using Axure to make the mid-fidelity interactive prototype. And to test our ideas, I have facilitated and run five usability tests with our customers.

Test the solutions with real user

This usability test was conducted as an unmoderated “think aloud” usability test via "Askable." In an unmoderated usability test, users are not observed live while they carry out tasks. Instead, their interactions with the website and their verbal comments are videos recorded for later analysis.

Five users each carried out 3 tasks on the website in separate usability test sessions. At the end of each usability test session, they answered a number of pre-defined questions.

By doing that, I have identified some positive and negative feedback from the user and also some unexpected user journeys while they using the prototype.

Usability test Findings

Improvement Areas

• We need to create clear distinctions between each menu labelling under the “Support” menu.
• Users go to the Product page to find a particular product to find downloads, not click through the Support menu.
• Users look for the "live chat" help feature, whenever they feel frustrated navigate on the support page.

Positive finding

• Test participants easily realised they can search product names to find an answer on the support landing page.
• Participants can easily understand each page and section meaning when they are doing the tasks, meaningful icons also help the user understand how to navigate and find the answer.

High Fidelity Design

What changes we made in the first iterations:

• Updated all the terms and content that the user feels confused about.
• Separate "Business support" from the support page.
• Add a support section on each product detail page.
• Added a "Live chat" feature on the support page, allow customers to talk to our online agent.

My Learnings

• Always clarity the context at the beginning of the project.
• Individual 1:1s with Leads before the team-wide research readouts help getting buy-in.
• The more you engage stakeholders in every stage of the research process, the more they are willing to act upon your findings.