Case Study 01 London Stock Exchange

Workspace, an enterprise software used by wealth advisors, investment bankers and portfolio managers, had seen a decline in customer engagement of their digital in-app help & support app, with many users reporting that it was hard to navigate and find relevant content.

Key Objective

Increase customer engagement by improving the user experience and adding features to drive more interaction with the digital help app.

Research & Discovery

The customer experience data analytics was conducted by a separate team prior to my involvement on the project. I approached them to obtain quantitative and qualitative data to help base my hypothesis on. While I would normally carry out my own customer interviews, the data I received was substantive and useful.

Key Findings

• Customers initially found it difficult to access the help app as it was hidden in one of many drop-down menus.
• The help app did not have any navigation to allow clients to navigate help documents.
• The content that was available to customers was very limited and often quite technical and did not address many of the problems they were experiencing.
• The search capabilities for finding help content were limited, and customers struggled to find relevant documents to solve their problems.
• All of the content available was generic and not tailored to any specific job role.

Competitor Analysis

I reviewed a large amount of websites and apps both inside and outside of the financial sector in order to get a diverse range of help and support apps and how they addressed some of the challenges we were experiencing. This provided me with valuable insights and ideas to share with the team.

Brainstorming & Ideation

With all of my research completed, it was time to start brainstorming ideas. Iterating on my initial concepts based on feedback from my peers and stakeholders at our bi-weekly end-of-sprint reviews, I was able to put forward many ideas that I felt would solve the issues that customers were having.

Working directly with the offshore developers was really useful in ensuring that what I was proposing was technically feasible, and I made sure to provide them with visibility on a weekly basis to verify that what I was proposing could be completed within the timescale I was given. This was where my background in development came in really useful to have those conversations.

Prototyping & Testing

Using their internal Design System 'Halo', I created numerous interactive prototypes in Figma to share ideas with stakeholders, showcase concepts to other design tribes to encourage collaboration and feedback and also to run some basic user testing with stakeholders that my product manager approached.

The Solution

Based on the customer data, stakeholder feedback, and my own insights, I focussed on three main areas;

1. The discoverability of the help app;
   1. Changed the hierarchy of the help menu to the top level
   2. Added help icons to components throughout Workspace that opened contextual help content specific to that component
   3. Introduced a navigation bar to allow users to move between help sections more intuitively
2. The search capabilities;
   1. Used an enhanced search system that was being used elsewhere in the app
   2. Added searchable tags to documents to make them more findable
   3. Utilised AI capabilities to suggest help content based on customers search criteria
3. The quality of the help content;
   1. Collaborated with the content team to improve the quality of the help documents
   2. Introduced videos to help documents to make the content more consumable to customers
   3. Personalised the help app and targeted content to customers based on their profiles such as job role, usage data, skill level, etc

Outcome & Results

• Within three months of its launch, the digital help & support app experienced a 130% increase in weekly active users.
• Customers' access to support content (documents and videos) increased by 80%.
• 65% reduction in bounce rates for customers reading help documents from start to finish, indicating a higher level of satisfaction.
• 38% reduction of customers contacted the help and support team via phone or live chat, indicating more customers are self-serving.

Challenges & Learnings

One of the most difficult challenges I had to face was the limitations of user testing. This was another service that was handled internally by another team. Unfortunately, there was a long waiting list to use them, which did not fit into my timeframes, so I had to conduct my own guerrilla testing on customers that my product manager was able to recruit.

The biggest learning I took away from this project, was the importance of collaborating with subject matter experts in each of the disciplines throughout the design process, which helped me validate my hypothesis.