Personalizing self-help with UX and UI

Zalando

Information architecture / UI / UX writing / Brand voice

©Zalando SE 2018

Zalando is one of Europe’s largest online fashion stores. As Editor of the self-help platform, I was tasked with ownership of six country-specific knowledge bases and how to enhance their usability to empower customers while reducing strain and costs on Customer Care.

The challenge

Zalando’s customer account team was not to be fully formed until almost a year after my team was created.

The goal was to find an elegant way to implement usability improvements for the most urgent contact cases first in self-help, but could easily be integrated into the customer account at a later time.

After gathering UX data like clickthrough rates, heatmaps, and customer care contact data, live user tests were conducted before any redesigns. Red post-its for pain points, green for positive reactions, yellow for observations.

©Zalando SE 2018

Solutions

The first priority was to introduce actionable buttons into articles that corresponded to the most common customer contact reason, to reduce copy and introduce the user to more personalized and empowering solutions.

©Zalando SE 2018

The biggest task was gradually merging self-help with the customer account over time. We first started with reshaping the self-help hub page to accommodate personalized content. Then when the dynamic user account homepage would be ready, a more focused, yet personalized self-help hub would be prominently accessible via a tile or ‘widget’ that displayed relevant customer info.

The last phase tackled navigation issues. There was no effective way to properly navigate the FAQ articles and not have to hit the browser’s back button if you wanted to return to a previous article. Related articles didn’t have their own space and mostly relied on text links.

So the team and I proposed a sidebar to navigate the different topics, a related articles section at the bottom of the article copy, and made the contact channels more transparent after we learned customers were happiest when we informed them what they could expect, should they choose to contact us using a particular channel.