The Case Study

 

POLYCOM'S Support

 

What is Polycom's Support application?
All Polycom account holders (customers and partners) have opportunities to engage with their online communities. And access to customized tools and resources for the following knowledge base: o Licensing & Product Registration
o Security Alerts and Security Bulletins
o Account Management
o Self-Service

 

 

Why was the old application underperforming?

 

The Challenge


 

The Polycom Support site (screenshot above) had following challenges:
o Too complex - User had to go through each line to locate support for their product item - huge time and cognitive stress.
o Too many duplicate details or duplicate names with unordered time stamp.
o No visual cue. No detail of the product.
o Redundant or missing links for downloads.
o Category and File types not segmentated: Product items (html page), user documents (pdf) maintenance documents (MSWord) all placed together.

 

 

Two Phase Approach

 

 

The reason to go with two different phase was through key insight that it would require a specific separate attention due to data overlaping in three different database.
o Phase I: Research (Interviews, Information Architecture, Competitive Analysis)
o Phase II: Design (wireframe, development and usability Test).

 

 

Research and Information Architecture

 

Capture user's pain points by interviewing help desk groups, logged tickets, hueristic evaluations of the support application (FAQS, documentations, links, knowledge base etc). Form logical groups. Data comparision. Content inventory and Competitive Benchmarking.


Interview and insight:

o Products cutoff mark was 3 years, however, 4-5 year old items were grouped together.
o No visual visibility for quick find. This forced the customers to read through the documents in detail.
o Set up two phase approach: Research (Interview, Information Architecture, Competitive Analysis) and Design (wireframe, development and usability Test).
o Content inventory helped in many ways. Understand each product's niche, Consolidate three different knowledge base datasource. journey maps, sales pipeline and comparative studies.

 

 

The Solutions