Role: UX associate for the Advisory Board Company, a health care consulting company
Site: help.advisory.com (archived)
Skills: systems design, iterative design, content writing, UX research, content testing, information architecture, hierarchy and taxonomy, Axure RP, Zendesk, content management systems
Task
In my first UX role 7 years ago, I built a help center. Our web team was small but mighty, with a lot of autonomy. For this 9-month project, I…
- compared support vendors’ features and costs, and then wrote slide decks to provide cost-benefit analysis and recommendations to leadership
- set up our implementation of a help ticketing system, including automation, service level agreements, and role-based permissions
- led UX research, such as analyzing website search data to look for trends or gaps in our web support
- wrote 65 articles that met our users where they were at
- QA tested and wrote up steps to replicate known bugs
- Designed ticket deflections, including self-service banners and support flows that suggested relevant articles based on matching keywords
Actions
Advisory Board’s users are tenured experts like hospital executives and administrators, but they weren’t always the tech-savviest. So I developed a voice like a patiently supportive but playful nephew who explained things that might seem obvious to a power user.
We gathered user feedback with one-click “is this helpful?” buttons on each support article. My personal favorite article I wrote was “Advisory.com search tips,” which explained the basics of special operators you can use in search bars. 24 out of 25 raters found it helpful!
Results
After overhauling the help center content, support tickets decreased from about 1,000 per month to about 350 per month, removing the need for an additional FTE employee and leading to a savings of at least $45,000/yr.
What’s more, most of the articles I wrote have barely changed in six years, even surviving a complete site overhaul and content migration to the new ask.advisory.com support site. It’s always satisfying when your work stands the test of time.