A question we hear a lot, from teams and professionals of all types, is how the team at InVision uses our own product.
InVision’s user enablement team recently took on a major overhaul of our Help Center—the go-to resource for new (and seasoned!) InVision users, on everything from uploading their first screen to using all of Craft’s plugins—and used the InVision platform to drive the project.
We talked with InVision team members Brandon Wolf, Rob Medina, and Sean Kinney to learn more about how they tackled this project, and how InVision helped them do it.
Starting with, ‘Why?’
InVision has grown quite a bit over the last few years, offering a whole host of new features and functionality. Because of that, the team realized the way they helped new users get rolling—and kept existing users in the loop—didn’t quite scale.
“We saw there was a gap in documentation around getting users started,” Brandon said. “The old Help Center was off-brand and had a ton of disparate FAQs.”
Sean agreed, noting the old center was modeled after the team’s old ticketing system, and that user enablement team members were running into recurring problems with new users expressing confusion about how to simply start using InVision.
“The goal was always clear: provide a better experience for our customers.”
“It just wasn’t doing the job,” Sean said. “We wanted to make it digestible and lessons-based.”
“Craft really drove home the need for this as well,” Rob added. “It’s a whole separate product, and there was a lot of confusion around that. The information we had was good, but it was overwhelming.”
Beyond the clear need from a user perspective, the team knew the old Help Center didn’t look like part of the InVision brand. Plus, it clearly wasn’t equipped to grow with the company.
While the content housed in the old Help Center was solid—and vast—the team knew it was also overwhelming and tricky to navigate.
So, they set to the task of reworking it—all of it—to form a more cohesive, lessons-based experience that provided actionable snippets of information on specific tasks.
“We built out guidelines together, of the big picture modules, and approached it from a user perspective: ‘Does this make sense based on the way customers ask questions?’” Rob said. “A big chunk of the work was shifting existing pieces around. Once we got that rolling, we tapped into our support team for feedback to keep iterating on the content itself.”
Two of the big hurdles projects often face are 1. Stakeholder buy-in, and 2. Prioritization. The team cleared those two pretty easily by focusing on the reason for redoing the center: to provide a better customer experience.
“[Our CEO] Clark was unsurprisingly a huge advocate for this,” Brandon said. “And once we had mockups to share, we would present them to him and get excellent feedback.”
“It was easy to prioritize because it had clear customer benefit,” Sean added. “No matter how the project changed, the goal was always clear: provide a better experience for our customers.”
The InVision redesign
Armed with refined content and a clear mandate from stakeholders, the team partnered up with designers within the marketing department to bring their vision to life.
“We started with a Board,” Sean said. “We used it to prioritize the various pieces we wanted, like an announcement section, a status page, an easy way to contact us—all of it.”
From there, the design team pulled together mockups, which stakeholders reviewed, commented on, and revised. Brandon noted that had it been available, Freehand would have been ideal at this stage!
Further discussion led to refined iterations, and ultimately created a design that couldn’t even compare to the old one.
Related: See how InVision uses Boards
Two things led to a solid outcome, Brandon said: Offering the design team resources and examples to help communicate their vision, and a clear and intentional plan for the goals and objectives the user enablement team wanted to accomplish.
“That really reduced the need for back and forth,” he said.
InVision’s redesigned Help Center.
In total, the team used the full breadth and scope of the InVision platform to design and create the new Help Center, focusing in particular on the ease with which they could gather and respond to feedback.
“What would have normally been a spiderweb of Google docs was organized masterfully and shared with everyone, including the entire support team for their commentary,” Brandon said. “And we used InVision not because it’s ‘our’ product, but because it truly was the best option for what we wanted to accomplish.”
The results
After a nearly year-long process, the team unveiled the redesigned Help Center January 31, 2017, and the feedback across the board has been overwhelmingly positive. The data supports the update too; views are up nearly 30 percent in less than 3 months.
Now, the team is focused on taking a data-driven approach to making the center even better over time.
“We’re continuing to iterate by tracking views, bounce rates, time on page, and other information,” Rob said.
“InVision truly was the best option for what we wanted to accomplish.”
Sean agreed: “We’re paying attention to articles that aren’t getting the love they deserve and using data to make the content better.”
Having a Help Center that can scale makes adding new features easier, which the team is excited to do with the upcoming ‘Community’ section, to be released this summer.
Community will provide a live forum for InVision users to share information, ask questions, and generate discussion around topics that matter to them. The team hopes it will lead to deeper conversations too, like design best practices and designing to solve complex challenges.
“There’s a massive opportunity there,” Brandon said. “All these conversations are happening elsewhere, like Slack and Twitter, so to bring those folks home and have a place for them to share—the opportunity is limitless.”
Check out the new Help Center for yourself here! Oh, and by the way: InVision is an amazing place to work. Check out our open positions here.
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