Golden Paths
At Microsoft, I led the "Golden Paths" UX initiative as a Senior User Experience Designer on the Xbox Studio Design team. My team was responsible for the xbox.support.com experience across mobile, web, console and native applications. As the Lead UX Designer on this initiative, I partnered with internal stakeholders from the User Research and Content teams. Our ultimate goals were to solve the “Top Ten Call Drivers” which were identified as major customer pain points within the Xbox Troubleshooting Article experience.
The Problem
My UX team was presented with a report and brief from the leadership team to address multiple issues within the Xbox Support customer experience. Data and insights provided by the User Research team showed a pattern of customer complaints to the customer service team focused on several areas within the Troubleshooting Article experience. We learned from quantitative and qualitative data that customers could not successfully troubleshoot their issues.
These problem areas were known as the “Top Ten Call Drivers." Data showed that customers were very "unhappy" as their efforts to solve their own issues lead to dead ends with no solutions in sight. They were overwhelmingly contacting customer support for help. The business felt a financial impact driving costs higher due to the call and chat volume increase.
The Approach
As the UX Lead on this initiative, in the Discovery phase, I began to devise a UX strategy to recommend solutions. By taking a systematic problem solving approach, I formulated a plan to first take a deep dive into each Support Article.
The goal was to identify customer pain points and highlight areas that could benefit from UX methodologies and strategies. Next, I would document the journey for each article, label and identify patterns that caused confusion, noted a network of inline links that led to dead ends, and highlighted cognitive overloads in copy content. Additionally, I mapped out emotional journeys to show what I discovered, confirming the ups and downs a customer might feel when engaging with the articles.
Often times the outcome was not favorable. What I validated was not only a poor customer experience but also an opportunity to present solutions.
I devised a framework, to work through each article. First, I identified Key Findings that mapped to common themes across the customer experience. I then broke down pain points that were present across the “Top Ten Call Driver” scenarios, created a rating system to define the emotional journey, gathered insights and proposed solutions.
As I shared my findings with the Content team, we began to collaborate. They shared their research and strategy with me, a set of Guiding Principals . I then mapped my work to their principals to further support our team and brand goals.
To present the work to stakeholders I created process flow diagrams to show how I worked through the content. Each scenario, showed how the customer searched for answers online, highlighted the pain points, created a rating system to track article success, added assumptions outlining various outcomes and, finally proposed a plan for recommended solutions.
Goals
To gain support from stakeholders, I presented side by side comparisons. Current examples called out general UX pain points and the Proposed examples showed how UX methodologies could improve the experience. Strategies included working with improving the visual hierarchy by using - smart grouping - grouping content, smart naming - re-naming headers and subheads, reducing the number of inline links by working with the copywriters to re-visit and reduce the copy content.
The emotional journey then helped to map and validate pain points as well as build empathy for the customer.
To present the findings to Stakeholders I created user flows showing how my UX work aligned with the Content Teams' Research and Strategy concepts This helped to validate key areas within the experience that needed improvements. These flow diagrams showed how customers may navigate through the website and called out areas in the information architecture that needed attention.
Ideation
Next, I built a prototype to share the recommended designs with the stakeholders. Several UX methodologies are highlighted here - hierarchy improvements featuring, placement for dynamic content, smart naming and grouping, reduced cognitive overload, and an overall improved and streamlined user experience.
Solutions
When considering scalability and how to share recommended best practices with the Content team, I created a comprehensive Style Guide to provide design guidance. Highlighted here are some of the pages from the Style Guide showing suggestions on how the UX recommendations can be used for both the Article and Browse experiences.
The Outcome
The impact of this work led to a successful re-design and copy overhaul for the first phase of work to solve the customer pain points within the Article Page experience. Each "Top Ten Call Driver" article was improved following the recommended UX guidance outlined in the Style Guide.
All re-designs were then A/B tested by the user research team who benchmarked the existing articles against the new designs to validate the changes. The results unanimously pushed through the recommended UX improvements one article at a time.
Next Steps
The next phase of work included taking a deeper dive into the Xbox Support Browse experience. This is the entry point to the Troubleshooting Article pages. My first step in the discovery process was to gather data by conducting a competitive analysis of other Support sites to learn more and take away key themes and insights.
The ultimate goal was to elevate the Xbox Support experience by taking into consideration new trends and methodologies. I focused on companies offering a superior Customer Support Experience. Here are some examples where I labelled areas that offered inspiration.
The Takeaways
There were many challenges faced while working on this initiative. Teamwork, clear communication and a passion for problem solving were themes that stood out throughout the nine month journey. I enjoyed the opportunity to collaborate and learn from other experts like researchers, copy writers, strategists, product and business managers. I also enjoyed presenting to leadership and learned how important it is to listen to the customer and work relentlessly to design better and more empathetic experiences.