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Connect Space

Refine the event management system

Project background: In contextual inquiry course, SI501, my team was connected to our client, Connect Space, as a consult team and help them to solve the information problems they faced.


As an innovative company providing needed services, Connect Space (formerly Message Blocks) already provides great customer service to its clients. However,as it continues to grow and provide services to additional clients, it must make sure that its employees and founders are effectively and efficiently using their time and focusing their efforts. Currently, clients who need help have the option of using the service’s chat system—a service that Connect Space purchases from the third-party for-profit company of Zendesk)—or going to the FAQ pages. Connect Space has noticed that more clients opt to go directly to the chat system as opposed to trying to find the answers within the FAQ pages. This method, however, takes more time and effort from Connect Space’s employees and founders. Moving forward, Connect Space would like to shift the clients’ focus from the chat system to the FAQ pages.

With that in mind, the Bicentennials used contextual inquiry methodologies in order to properly assess the relevant issues and provide potential solutions.

Date: 2017
My Role: UX Consultant, Visual Designer
Category: UX Research
Member: Bomi Shim, Oshin Nayak, Rugved Arte, Silvia Alexandria Mansoor

Methodology Overview

  • Design Process

    Initial Meeting

    The initial meeting with the Connect Space gave us the understanding about their goals and organization. We gathered overall information about how the company works and the different people involved. The clear understanding of the client problem was achieved during this meeting which guided us in the right direction to solve the problem.

  • Design Process

    Background research/ Heuristic evaluation of the problem and client

    We conducted a general review session to gather more information about Connect Space and analyzed our findings from the initial meeting and their website. With the the login credentials, we understood the core functionality of the website and identified key problem areas on the website as the FAQ section and its visibility.

  • Design Process

    Interview

    Designing interview protocols:

    We designed the interview protocols by the the different people related to the website and their roles. The protocols were divided between the end users and the employees who provided support using the FAQ pages and the chat system. The questions were framed in a manner to understand the usual user queries and the problems experienced during solving those queries for the employees with the support role.


    Blog Post

    Interviewees:

    • Event planner
    • Connect Space’s employee who is in charge of customer service
    • Connect Space’s employee who is in charge of design the web.

    Five user interviews were conducted, three with the employees and two with the clients of connect space. We conducted ethnographic interviews for the employees where we observed them in their work environment. We found very significant findings about the team working for connect space observing their behavior while performing their duty and listening to them. The Connect Space’s clients were interviewed remotely using video conferencing. The clients were asked to perform the tasks which they usually performed while interacting with the system.

  • Design Process

    Affinity Wall

    An affinity wall is a method used to group together similar ideas and draw conclusions from all the interviews. We used yellow sticky notes to write our findings or important concise points from different interviews. A pink sticky note was used to summarize the information from the column was stuck on top it. It created a hierarchical structure to represent all the information we had gathered during user interviews. The next level of the hierarchy were the blue sticky notes. The blue notes represent the facts we found after a rigorous structuring and synthesis of data gathered during the interviews. These blue notes can be summarized as the key findings from the user interviews.

  • Design Process

    Recommendation

    Through the interviews and affinity wall, we found 5 major causes of the core problem of the users using the chat more than the FAQ pages. We listed down the problems and researched more about tackling each of the issues and other solutions implemented for similar type of problems taking help from the background research. We drafted recommendations which could solve most of their problems and selected final recommendations based on practicality and cost of implementation. Each member of the team voted for the recommendation after discussing the pros and cons about each recommendation.

Affinity Wall

Design Process
Design Process
Design Process
Design Process

Finding

Flow Model
Design Process
Access menu to FAQ page has poor visibility

In event planning page, which the event planners use most frequently, the FAQ is not accessible. There is not button/link to the FAQ page. Our interviewee also mentioned that she almost forgot this page because she never saw it in the event planning system.

Moreover, on the updated home page, ‘Support’ menu only appears when the scroll is located at the top. Even though, as an alternate, they put ‘Help Center’ menu at the top to access FAQ pages, it only shows when ‘Resources’ menu is hovered

Design Process
Zendesk allows limited customization

To develop FAQ pages, Connect Space uses a 3rd party-tool Zendesk solution. However, due to the limited customization, FAQ pages do not have preferable UI.

In the page, users see the duplicated title and content again, and they have to click the title and wait until reach the next page to get any actual information. In the next page, finally user can see the explanation of the question. Overall, there are many content redundancies and unnecessary steps. It discourages people to use FAQ pages.

Design Process
End users prefer Email or Chat

The 80-90 percent of 1:1 chat inquiries occur from end users who are event planners or event attendees. Also, the interviewees choose the exclusive slack channel and e-mail to asking the support. This is caused due to two main reasons. First, most inquiries cannot be generalized. The diverse inquiries need to be solved by personal support. Second, if an inquiry occurs during an event, it needs to be handled right away.


Lack of clarity on the Support roles and responsibilities between employees

To answer 1:1 chat inquiries, at least one employee needs to online on their chat service. This makes the 1:1 chat support role crucial. However, we discovered that this role and its responsibilities are not clearly defined. For instance, E2 (one of our interviewees) explained that all team members take in part in the 1:1 chat response, while E1 and E3 explained that this task is E2’s responsibility.

Recommendations

Based on the background research and the interview, we propose the recommendations that echo to our major findings of current FAQ page, including interface’s visibility, usability, structure, end user behavior and the support process.

1

Improving the Support Process - Change the order of inquiry

Users strongly rely on the mail and live chat system not only because they prefer the direct communication but also because they think the 1:1 chat system is the only channel that they can use on the website. With the recent design, the order of accessing the supports, users might focuses on the chat system rather than use the FAQ page. Thus, this order should be changed, from FAQ page to 1:1 chat system.

In the current system, users might see the live chat on any page in the planning system. If Connect Space employees are offline, the user will be directed to the FAQ page only after they submit their question. To increase the usage of FAQ page, we recommend that the system should display the two functions in a different order. The system should guide users to the FAQ page first and then provide the additional live chat system for further queries.

Brainstorming

2

Visibility-Link the relevant FAQ content to the specific page

In Connect Space’s current system, they can track inquirers’ clicker position on the website when analyzing the problem they are facing. With this information, we recommend that Connect Space can develop a smart FAQ assistant that can link the relevant FAQ contents to the page automatically. The smart assistant could be a floating button on the edge or a small window/frame that display relevant contents. Thus, when the query arises, inquirers can access the relevant information immediately without detouring through the mass contents in recent FAQ page.

The smart assistant can extract the problems that user might face from the FAQ database based on the users' mouse positions and demonstrate the relevant articles to users. For instance, when an inexperienced event planner works on the payment, the smart assistant will connect to the managing payment articles and provide the link whenever the query arises.

Brainstorming

3

Visibility-Add buttons that guide user to FAQ

In event planning page, Connect Space can add a FAQ button to the tab. Users can easily find the link and further read it. Moreover, a button added to the chat window might also direct users who face common issues to the FAQ page for further answers before submitting an inquiry ticket to Connect Space. These two approaches are derived from the interviewees’ demonstrations when they were asked to enter the FAQ page. Two interviewees mentioned the missing of the link and one of them highlighted that he/she are willing to check the FAQ page before directly contact Connect Space if is easily accessible.

Brainstorming

4

Usability-Add video tutorials in the FAQ

FAQ page should be a space that users can search and learn quickly. The video tutorial can be added to text-based articles (Figure 10). Video tutorials are a widely adopted approach to improve the learning. With videos, users quickly absorb information and retain it too. It can also demonstrate real-time manipulation and process of the system. Thus, users can easily map and memorize the flow of operation and work on their interface.

Brainstorming

Yu-Cheng Jane Chang

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