Airheads
Support Hub & Community
- User experience designWebsite
I worked side-by-side with a senior designer to manage the project from start to finish, from kick-off and information gathering to visual design and handoff.
As a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, they are striving to create smarter, simpler networks for businesses and other organizations by providing complete networking and security infrastructure solutions.
It was created by Aruba Networks to provide a place for their customers to ask questions, find solutions, and provide answers about Aruba's products and services, as well as other network and technology-related topics.
They had multiple areas of their online presence for customer support including a general support website, enclosed & separated product customer support hubs, and the Airhead support community—all with their own & overlapping articles, downloadable files and resources, and FAQs. There was no one go-to place for customers to find help regarding their purchased products and systems, which created confusion as customers were directed to different websites for their needs. Aruba needed a way to streamline their support offerings and locations. In addition, they needed a method to measure the effectiveness of their online support as well as redesign their support case creation system to lower demands on their overly busy customer support team by allowing custmers to find solutions easily and quickly before and during case creation.
Aruba Networks's support community was constrained to the technical restrictions of the Lithium community platform. In addition, the scope of the project was to work within the community website framework, as the general support website and enclosed product customer support hubs were the domain of other Aruba teams that did not have the budget for design work.
Success meant that all support knowledge would be accessible from the community website. It would be transformed into the central hub for all support teams in Aruba, and a clean handoff to Aruba's internal engineering team would be the end of the project.
Our focus was to acquire user perspectives and experiences within Airheads and other Aruba support websites in order to inform the design of Airheads to be the central support hub.
We did thorough research on Aruba’s complex support ecosystem, containing multiple locations and power for user product and license management, support cases, search engines, support articles, solution FAQs, and other support-related customer solutions. Some led to dead ends with no way back or forward from the page. Different search engines could return different websites and pages.
We also met with the stakeholders of the product as well as Aruba’s support community leaders and users to understand their motivations, use cases, and pain points.
What we discovered was a variety of issues that led to the overarching problem of, “We cannot find the solution to what we want.” Major issues included:
One of the major efforts was taking all of the support and community content and restructuring the entire website to make sense from the perspective of a user looking for a solution to his or her technical networking problems. What resulted was an information architecture model to organize our ideas and to communicate and align with the management and engineering teams.
After some research on existing patterns for support websites and communities, we got to work on solving the interface problems for Aruba’s support website. The majority of the work involved rethinking the information and navigational hierarchy and visual grouping. The results are as follows.
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After the restructuring and combining of Aruba’s support websites, the result was a central hub for an existing customer to manage his or her products as well as look for solutions to any of their problems. The most wide-spread and popular issues and solutions would be brought to the forefront as well as related resources and alternate solutions (e.g. contacting support) would be displayed in an appropriate location during the search.
In addition, a visual design based on Aruba’s existing visual identity system was created as a suggestion on how to visually organize and display the website content for maximum effectiveness.
Learned Lessons: Technologies have their restrictions, and certain restrictions could be pushed farther based on business and user priorities, but the structure and limitations of a technology should be thoroughly discussed and researched before the project start. Sometimes, a switch of tool may be best for the business goals and save the most time and resources in the end.
