SQUARESPACE HELP CENTER
Help customers succeed by providing resources and support for true comprehension of our product.
Motivated to help them help themselves.
Role & Team
Initially as a Growth team Product Design Lead I took interest in the Help Center, support.squarespace.com because I knew it was a complex area of Squarespace that so many of our users visit to look for support and guidance. I have a personal interest in education and I enjoyed knowing there are multiple methods of providing self-learning content such as written guides, video series, webinars and forums.
In the beginning, I was supporting as an individual contributor as the team was in its infancy and just beginning to be built out within the Product organization. After working hands on toward a product vision, design discovery, and launching a redesign of our homepage I was able to prove value and begin growing the team to have more dedicated resources to be the size it is today.
Team Mission
Help customers wherever they are in their journey to get the most out of our product.
Focused Goals & Metrics
– Improved discoverability
– Updated brand alignment
– Deflection rate
– Customer Satisfaction Score
– Bridge gap between Product, Customer Operations, and Customer Education departments
Team Contributors
Scott Yim – Senior Product Manager
Charlie Geyer – Program Manager
Marin Abernethy – Engineer Lead
Mika Suneja – UX Researcher
Emily Cooper – Data Analyst
Claire Nasuti – Director, CustEd
Jessie Carroll – Team Lead, CustEd
Michael Fodera – Team Lead, Video
Chris Laine – Team Lead, Community
Initiatives & Project Overview
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Future Vision
In the beginning, a lot of my work was done just playing in Figma and exploring the potential of the Help Center and what it could some day look like within our users’ journey.
I sketched out dream states and ideas I had of a cohesive experience that better aligned with our product and brand. Through this vision work and the support of leadership we were able to build out a new product team dedicated to the Help Center which I now manage.
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Contact Customer Care
A major touch point in the experience for customers is right before they contact us. This step involves the user self-identifying their issue type so they can be routed to the best advisor support queue.
The experience as it exists today is fragmented, poorly architected, and demands a lot of our users. In this work I explore far reaching concepts as well as leaner more feasible and viable solutions. I worked with UX Research to run pie tree tests on an entirely new information architecture and we had 80 users participate.
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Homepage Redesign
This was the first major overhaul of the Help Center domain in over 5+ years. It was done by borrowing engineering support, building out a dedicated team, and advocating for this team. I learned so much about leadership and strategic planning through this project. And it’s exciting that it’s only the beginning of improvements for our users.
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Team Growth and Leadership
Through proposing the need for a dedicated Product Manager, Designer and Researcher I was able to grow more skills in team leadership and team building.
I work closely with our recruiting partners to define job descriptions, design level needed, and planning interview panel groups.
Not only did I heavily focus on adding key team players but I also worked closely with my Product Manager partner to organize our team rituals, cadences and team norms.
We focused on discoverability to provide self-serviceable solutions.
OBJECTIVE
The Help Center homepage was originally released in 2015 and was mainly untouched for 5 years, except for maintenance. Our team wanted to reimagine it to improve our users’ experience. We also prioritized making sure we could capture data to gauge customer intent for future.
WHY
This domain is high traffic area that has almost 500,000 unique page views in Q2 2020 alone! That translates to 38,000 unique daily visitors. About 8,000 users that land on the homepage every day. So there is a huge opportunity to be better brand aligned and steer users to our existing help resources where they can find the answers they seek.
FOCUSED METRICS
1. Increase homepage clicks to be better utilized
2. Lessen “Contact Us” clicks from the homepage
3. Decrease case volume that is self-serviceable
4. Increase deflection rate
LEARNINGS
1. Reduced clicks to “Contact Us” by 3%
2. 21% of users scrolled to the bottom of the page
3. 82% of users searched within 30 seconds
4. For guides, “Websites” had the highest engagement