In February 2017, Fitbit wanted to improve its customer support website, help.fitbit.com, as part of an internal initiative to modernize its CMS platform. I consulted with the customer support team to redefine the self-service experience. One of the main goals was to empower users to access help through the website instead of calling Fitbit directly–improving the user experience and reducing the number of calls to the call center. In order to accomplish this, we needed to rethink the navigation system of the entire site.
Although Fitbit had a mature product design team, the customer service platform was an entirely separate entity. Not only was the team in its own building, but it did not have a design presence. Individually, I consulted with three stakeholders representing the User Authentication team, the Community Forum team, and the Help team. Each had drastically different points of view on what to prioritize.
In order to get stakeholder alignment, I created a map of the user journey that visualized the different ways consumers access services through fitbit.com. This process helped unify our efforts and clarify requirements for the initial phase of the design.
In the existing platform, if customers were unable to find the answers to their questions, they were asked to fill out a multi-step questionnaire before calling help.
Fitbit had a large amount of data on how users interacted with the site. By analyzing the data, I was able to identify core topics/tags that could be surfaced onto the landing page. A user interacting with the tags could quickly narrow their search and find the article they were looking for.
I gathered heatmaps from existing research that revealed customer’s needs. Mainly: contact support, how to use their tracker, and utilize search.
The complexity of the project involved documenting research, examining the existing information architecture of help.fitbit.com, and finding order in a large number of help articles.
To assist with understanding the data, I designated an underused conference room and brought all the pieces into a cohesive whole.
After identifying key pain points in the current user experience, I rapidly sketched ideas to explore new ways to access articles, identify a tracker, search, and access the community.
During this process I reached out to other teams to get input, this helped bridge inter-team gaps and improve relationships. These cross-team meetings continued outside the scope of this effort.
After gathering quantitative data from visitors to help.fitibit.com, I designed three scenarios and flows based on personas that matched the characteristics of the data. The primary persona was female, between 24 - 60 years old, and had interests in travel, the arts, and entertainment.
I focused on a mobile first design approach since the metrics showed that most users access help from their mobile devices while on the go. In addition to the mobile workflow, I also designed screens for the desktop experience as well.
The new designs and overall user experience were well received by the Help team and the set of extended stakeholders. The artifacts were captured in a presentation for the team. After the engagement, due to competing priorities, the CMS upgrade initiative was placed on hold and the project did not move forward.