NBC Help Center
Case Study
About The Project
NBC’s Help Center needed some user experience love and care. The design team initiated a partnership with the customer support team after raising a number of UX concerns. With the CS team onboard, we presented a full audit of the help center with a list of suggestions and improvements. Both teams agreed that the landing page needed the most attention.
The Challenges
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As a frequently overlooked portion of our product, how can we most effectively raise our UX concerns to organization executives?
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Many help centers appear to be using the same Zendesk template - how can we leverage ours in order to stand out amongst the rest?
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After launch, how will we be able to measure success?
Collection our competitors reviewed during our Help Center's Landing Page redesign.
The Process
Before jumping into a redesign, our design team decided to conduct an unmoderated A/B usability test. We believed running a user test would be the best way to raise attention to our leadership team. The key objective of this test was to gain supporting data that a new landing page layout for the NBC Help Center will help users find solutions to their issues more efficiently. Our team decided to test against Venmo’s help center after completing a competitive analysis on other help centers.
Although we did not consider Venmo a direct competitor to our apps, we found both help centers solved similar customer issues. Our team also believed Venmo’s help center appeared much more clean and concise. User testers guided us through their experience within the help centers. Along the way we prompted users to provide us with overall impressions. After seeing both sites users were asked, “Which of the two sites helped you find a solution to your issue most efficiently?”.
Comparing first impressions of Venmo and NBC's Help Centers
The Outcome
While users did not strongly prefer one site versus the other - 68% of users conveyed negative feedback regarding the layout of NBC’s Help Center. Common phrases like, “overwhelming” and “cluttered” were mentioned. To our surprise, 50% of users conveyed negative feedback regarding Venmo’s site. A majority of concerns were directed towards the site appearing too “simplistic” or “minimal”.
The UX team identified and presented two areas for improvement. Majority of user testers felt the current layout was overwhelming, and deterred them from browsing through our list articles. Our solution entailed establishing 4-6 categories to bucket articles into cleaner sections, while maintaining a list of 10-15 popular articles on the home page. Another area of concern was how some users were unaware of the relationship between the list of network logos and NBC. Although we were not testing for brand recognition, we offered to solve this issue by creating a clearer hierarchy on the page. These solutions offered a hybrid- approach to both help centers. This allowed us to maintain NBC’s colorful branding and showcase the most relevant articles.
With the help of our SEO team, we’ve been able to track our users’ paths while browsing through the help center. As expected, a majority are finding their solutions via the search. But metrics have been pointing towards an increase in category page-views and overall less drop-off. Our team is continuing to monitor these behaviors and implement new iterations in the future.
Most recent iteration of the NBC Help Center