Overview

The current support center for company product lines resided in Atlassian Confluence. While informative, the interface wasn’t easily searchable and the support text was tilted to an engineering-focused audience, and required an update to become approachable to a wider swath of users, to align more closely with audience metrics.

Challenge and Goals

To create a document export solution for clients who required a separate support system, update content to align to audience metrics, and extend the brand voice of the company to a user-friendly, searchable support center.

Site requirements and metrics

Working closely with customer success, marketing and development teams, these criteria were identified:

• Customers were already filing support tickets in Zendesk, and Zendesk’s theming system and searchable interface and extensibility made it the appropriate portal for customer questions, ease of maintenance, and FAQs / support documentation
• Development identified an open-source framework, DITA, as the source of document “truth”, with capability to export help center articles to Zendesk
• Develop a visual design for the support system, extended from corporate website design patterns, with review and approval from marketing team
• Optimize support calls to reduce time spent on frequently asked questions, garnered from support tickets

After identifying requirements, Customer Success worked with Support team to rewrite documentation to support general use of the app as well as frequently asked questions fielded by support staff. Development got started on DITA, and building flow from DITA to Zendesk.

While those teams were in action, user experience and user interface improvements moved forward by:

• Wireframing the current content map and making recommendations to improve flow and reduce number of actions to get to desired content
• Designing a Zendesk theme extended from Aeris brand guidelines and design patterns on corporate site
• Building a theme and templates within Zendesk

Result

An easy to use Support Center, which has allowed the support team to field more complex issues instead of simple questions. The DITA source material allows export of help documentation into any number of formats for customers that require their own help system. The extension of site brand guidelines and design patterns promote brand trust and consistency when navigating between products and the support center.