Laserfiche Help

Laserfiche Help is a responsive website that help customers solve their problems by searching and browsing categories. With smart filtering and topics that are broken down based on the experience level with Laserfiche softwares, customers can find what they are looking for easily and explore similar topics.

Why?

Companies have always spent so much attention on their homepage and I understand why, it makes good first impression and draws potential customers. However, it takes more than that to maintain good relationships with existing customers.

Laserfiche Help have always play an important role helping users with latest fixes, releases, and educational resources. But the current site was built in 2008 and have never been updated since. We decided to take initiative and redesign the site.

Goal

Redesign and restructure the information architecture of Laserfiche Help so that the information is accessible and findable. With the new site, we hope to reduce support call and increase the sense of community.

Research Process

To innovate the process at Laserfiche, we approached this project with user research up front. 

• 14 individual interviews
• Affinity diagram analysis
• Personas & Scenarios
• Tasks flow
• Storyboarding
• Interaction flow map
• Competitive Analysis

Interviews & Affinity Diagram

We interviewed 14 individuals including customers, support team, solution engineers, and CTO.  Our questions includes: what does Laserfiche Help means to you? Walk us through the last time you used Laserfiche Help. What is the hardest part about solving problem using Laserfiche help. Rather than asking what they like and what they want the software to be, we focus on how their current behavior and the pain points of using Laserfiche Help. After the interview, we used affinity diagram to analyze the data bottom-up. There are total of 140 notes. Finding:

• People don't know the difference between different content type, they just want to get to the content as quickly as possible.
• Search and browse are equally important.
• People come here when they have a problem to solve.

Personas & Scenarios

Based on our interview findings, we went ahead and use Lean UX's approach to create quick persona. We have three different type of users. A reseller, a IT admin and end user. When creating the personas and scenarios, we focus on three aspects:

• Demographics
• Pain points
• Potential solutions

Storyboarding

To illustrate the scenario better, I created the storyboard for the end user scenario.

Information Architecture

We also took a look at the current information architecture and proposed a new architecture based on the research finding.

Comparative Analysis

Comparative Analysis on 15 major help/support site was conducted to learn how others organize their information, and in which aspect they succeed or fail. We didn't include our own product because it's so out-dated in every aspect, instead we looked at other products to identify what could work well with a large number of products.

Define Design Goal

After all the research, we translate the research data into design goal. It helps us focus on the key feature that we want to achieve.

• Browse is as important as search
• Product centric navigation
• Content types really don't matter to customers, they just want to find answers

We also got feedback from stakeholders and president:

• We want people use Answers more to create a sense of community

Ideation

I explore different directions by sketching as many ideas as possible fairly quickly. The app Paper made it easier to sketch on my iPad.

wireframe & Implementation

After sketching and discussing with the team, I translate the result into wireframe. While in the wireframe stage, we also took responsive design into consideration, and took the "Mobile First" approach. The wireframe received great responses and people are excited to see a new look.  It is in the progress of implementing.