Support Section

Until mid-2019, customers on BradyID didn’t have a self-service portal for support, putting unnecessary strain on the call-center and chat system for even basic questions. 

A big goal of this project was to decrease the number of calls and chats for those simple problems & solutions that users should be able to solve on their own; enabling technical support staff to spend more time & attention on complex cases.

Designed across whiteboards, sketchbooks, Sketch, and HTML/CSS.

1. Design Studio

Our first step (after research, which was primarily handled by the UX Manager prior to my hire), was to get a cross-functional group of employees together for a day-long design studio where we could throw ideas at the wall and hopefully leave with solid ideas to continue iterating on.

We had a great group of people attend from design, customer and technical support, merchandising, and project management. After splitting into a couple teams, we regrouped and shared the work with everyone.

2. Sketches & Revisions

After leaving the Design Studio with great ideas and copious notes, we set off trying to find the perfect blend that solved our initial prompts, and was forward facing enough to adapt to any future requests. That meant combining some ideas, redesigning others, and trying all new concepts that hadn’t been breached at the design studio.

This was done across numerous meetings, on whiteboards and in sketchbooks, and then nicely redrawn for review with stakeholders.

3. Jumping To Code

With our sketches feeling pretty final, we decided to jump past Sketch mockups and dive into coding something we could put on the site and start showing to partners and stakeholders ASAP.

To do this, we broke the page into chunks, each of us working on different sections individually, before coming back together to finalize them and get things working together neatly. 

This also allowed us to start testing with real users sooner than later.

4. Soft Launch & Iterating

With the page coded and testing well, we pushed it live and let our partners across support know it was ready for customers. As the hits began going up, we’ve watched how they use it and monitored spots of frustration and have already made a few changes and updates to address their concerns.
 
One example of that is creating a secondary page for additional FAQs that don’t quite fit on the main Support landing page. Another was pulling out popular quick links and making them more visual. Both were minor changes that were easy to add thanks to how we built the page modularly.
BID_Support-Active
Printer Support Page
BID_Support-Retired
Retired Printer Page
BID_Support-Articles
Searchable Support Articles

5. What's Next?

We’ve already redesigned the “owner” and “retired” pages to become Support specific, pulling them under the new Support umbrella. We also worked with Customer/Technical Support to rebrand and update their Knowledge Base, replatforming and titling it: “Searchable Support Articles.” Beyond that, there are still more plans to build out robust Support pages for Software items, eliminating the reliance on external sites we have less control over.

We’re still actively monitoring this section and making updates as we find users struggling to find their way. 

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