Challenge
Our customers approached us to create a portal allowing them to communicate and keep track of their cases with Customer Satisfaction. They needed the ability to see the status of their issues or site enhancements, as well as create new cases within the portal. Previously, they could only email or call, speaking with someone directly to open a case.
In addition to providing the customers with the transparency they were looking for, the company saw the opportunity to roll our help site into this new experience. This would allow one location for the users to go to rather than multiple sites. The challenge was to create a new portal with separate unauthenticated/authenticated experiences, identify roles and permissions based on the users, and migrate our entire help site into this new CMS, Salesforce.
Personas
As this was a customer-driven initiative, it was key to identify who would be using the portal from the start. As we were working with librarians, it was important to understand their roles and the dynamics of the institutions they worked for. Some institutions were solo and worked with EBSCO independently. Others were part of a consortia which would have different needs. In some instances, an institution may belong to both categories. This created additional "rules" for us to identify when it came to authentication and transparency. We narrowed down our personas to the following four categories.
User Journeys
At different points in the project it was necessary to create user journeys or flows. A few of the flows we wanted to identify were the users' experience whether or not we migrated the knowledgebase, the registration process, and what opportunities they would have upon signing in.
Site Structure
As requirements changed and issues were identified, the overall structure of the site evolved too. With the different iterations came updates to the site map that was being shared across the different teams. I used different methods of creating the site map depending on the stage of the project.
Content Wires
The content wires were created early on to facilitate the conversation between departments. As we tackled different sections of the site I created additional wires to figure out the hierarchy of information we wanted to present to our customers.
Prototype
From the initial prototype to the most recent, there were dozens of iterations based on feedback from stakeholders. Depending on the needs, I created various prototypes to give everyone an idea of what it would be like to sign in, click through the case details, and interact with account pages.
View the prototype to see the full experience. Please request the password as it isn't fully developed for our customers.
Style Guide
The developers we were working with requested a style guide to work from. It highlighted our color palette, different component interactions, and responsive typography.
UI & Visual Design
I collaborated with other designers on my team to complete the visual design. As it was a quick turn around I reached out to one of our graphic designers, Rob Stewart, for assistance with the illustrative icons found on the homepage.
QA
It was very important to our team to produce a final product that we could be proud of. In order to pinpoint locations on the site that needed to be tweaked, I created a spreadsheet for QA. My team helped to go through all of the pages and breakpoints, identifying where those issues occurred. I took screenshots showing what needed to be changed and provided mocks to show what the design should be.
Before & After
Before we had EBSCO Help where customers could go to find articles if they had questions around our products. It was a hub for alerts, trainings, webinars, logins, and articles organized by markets.
After we have an updated help site on a new CMS. With all of the content migrated into Salesforce, customers can search for articles and be deflected to an article while creating a case. There is an unauthenticated experience where users can interact with those help articles, access the tools and resources, create a case, and view system alerts. In addition to these tasks, the authenticated experience allows users to view their case list and see detailed information of each, view their account and see who else in on their "team." Customers will also be able to communicate to others and cust sat through the forums.
Development
I had the opportunity to work with offshore developers. There were challenges that came with that: time zones, learning curves of a new CMS, and different terminology, but it was a great experience and pushed me to work harder to get a final product that we could be proud of.
