The Avanade support portal was last updated in 2016. Due to overwhelming feedback from employees, the Avanade leadership prioritized a refresh of the support portal that aimed to focus on a "self-service" first user experience. The desired refresh consisted of new content taxonomy for the over 10,000 unique pieces of content, as well as governance guidelines for current and new content.
Role: UX Researcher and Content Strategist
Timeline: 6 months
Avanade support teams are often overwhelmed and have increased workloads due to Avanade employees prioritizing opening tickets and calling the help desk.
Support portal stakeholders desired to implement a self-service first experience for the portal refresh.
A refresh of the Avanade support portal that focuses on content hierarchy rather than visual flourish.
A user flow analysis allowed us to understand how users are navigating through the site. Along with some user interviews and research, we were able to understand how users at Avanade approach the entire support process.
Our goal for the research phase was to understand the following:
1. What are user’s behaviors and motivations when they need support - this will help us to understand how to best position the support portal to be a support resource that matches employee expectations.
2. What do they consider as self-service - this will allow us to understand how to best structure support content and features to match the consensus employee expectations, designing for the general, not the edge cases.
Fig. 1 A click-through analysis of all user paths when navigating the Avanade support portal
Employees are not always finding what they're looking for on the first or even their second try. This implies the following:
A. Unclear or incomplete results in search
B. Unrelated content exists in the articles
Users default to a support request because they have problems finding what they need in the current support taxonomy.
Over a one month period of research, our team conducted over 50 one-on-one user interviews as well as launched multiple surveys that garnered 100+responses. Here are the key research takeaways:
Without Intuitive wayfinding, users struggled to locate resources that were correct and accurate, which reduced their confidence in the system’s ability to meet their needs.
Over time, Avanade’s lack of self governance for intranet support resources caused an accumulation of outdated and incomplete content that negatively impacts usability.
Support providers were neither able to allocate their time efficiently, nor appropriately when the preferred method of problem resolution for users was to contact them directly.
A refresh of the Avanade support portal that prioritizes content hierarchy, findability and governance in order to accommodate future content and features.
#1 Audit all of Avanade's support content
- There are over 10,000 pieces of unique content in the Avanade taxonomy.
- All content was contained within 427 parent categories.
- Several parent categories only had one piece of content.
Fig 2. 427 parent categories in the support portal taxonomy represented by a color
#2 Validate the usability of the old taxonomy
Testing was done with new employees, veteran employees and international employees. A card sort was executed and served as the baseline for the first reorganization of all the content in the taxonomy.
Fig 3. Parent categories were streamlined and rearranged based on user feedback
Fig 4. Treejack testing data suggests that users struggle with navigating the current content taxonomy
#3 Reorganize the content using user testing data
Refining the content taxonomy involved identifying trends and relationships, while also removing edge case categories. We then conducted a second round of Treejack testing with a new user group, which resulted in significantly higher task success rates.
Fig 5. Results from the second round of treejack testing indicated better mental model alignment with the new taxonomy, and easier findability of content.
Fig 6. The homepage of the new Avanade support portal
01 Focus on the three main categories:
The new site has three main parent categories: HR, IT and Security These categories were determined by user feedback and validation.
02 Improved SEO for support articles
The search bar functionality has been improved to enable users to better search the Avanade support repository.
Since release, there have been a significant reduction in support tickets.
Support staff are no longer overwhelmed with support calls.
Knowledge base governance and guidelines exist to align with user expectations.
Knowledge base article structure and Governance
As phase 2.1 of the project, I believe that the best area to upgrade is the knowledge base article structure and governance. I believe that updating content to be more readable, usable and relevant will improve the support experience of Avanade employees even further.
Leveraging new LLMs and AI
There is a lot of opportunity to incorporate AI into the next evolution of the support portal at Avanade. I believe the following would be great use cases for these new technologies:
- Conversational support
- Knowledge base integration
- Personalized recommendations
- Content generation with multilingual support
- Sentiment analysis and feedback processing
- Virtual assistant and triage
This project operated in a fast timeline. There were a lot of busy days, but in summary, I learned how to prioritize tasks better and more efficiently.
New methods of validation
Throughout this research project, I was exposed to multiple levels of research methodologies. Objectives are really important in determining what research method to use.
Establishing and organic user pool
One of the most difficult parts of this project was recruiting users. We did not have a pool of users to select from so we had to organically build our pool of users. Through numerous company posts and email requests, we were able to establish a pool of over 200 users! Users that we use for other projects.
Project management
I had plenty of opportunities to play the project manager role throughout this project. Without an official project manager, I was pushed out of my comfort zone in setting up calls with stakeholders and making sure that designers and developers are on the same page regarding the redesign.
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