IT Help Desk | A platform that solves all your problems

7 min readMay 3, 2023

Project Overview

Context

ACME is a Corporate Finance consulting company. ACME is in need of a new Help Desk application to better organize IT support tasks between ACME consultants and IT Help Desk staff.

Scenario

John is ACME financial consultant, and he is using a company Windows 10 laptop. One morning, John that he is not able to open a PowerPoint presentation on his computer. He sends an email to ACME Help Desk. After just a couple of minutes, John receives a reply from Adam, a ACME Help Desk agent. John is not completely sure if he understands the resolution outlined in that email, so he picks up the phone and calls Adam to further clarify on next steps. After Adam successfully guided John to resolve the issue, they both now consider the case to be closed and they wish each other a good and productive work-day.

Design challenge

My goal is to design Help Desk Application to streamline the communication between John and Adam. The app should be designed to organize tasks for agents to help troubleshoot issues, assisting customers or employees with any hardware, software or in any other context.

Design approach

Understand

Requirements- What, Why, When

This Help Desk application is a one stop platform for employees who create service tickets and IT agents who resolve the tickets received from employees in the organisation. When an employee creates a service ticket on the platform, the ticket is assigned to a respective IT agent and he begins to resolve them. After the resolution, the respective agent changes the status of the ticket to ‘Closed’.

Employee wants a quick solution in odd timings also i.e. when the IT agents are not available
Provide a documented solution as soon as the employee types his problem, i.e. before creating the ticket
IT agent should be able to rank the request in the context of urgency of the request
IT agent should be able to maintain a log of all the requests and able to view it when ever he requires to
IT agent should be able to connect to the employee via chat, video call or voice call to receive further clarification if needed on the ticket
IT agent should receive notification when an employee raises a request
IT agent should be able to change status of a ticket from ‘Open’ to ‘Closed’
IT agent should be able to delegate the tickets to a other IT agent
IT agent should be able to connect to the employee via chat, video call or voice call to receive further clarification if needed on the ticket

Research

Competitive analysis

I wanted to see how other companies are doing in their IT help desk business
So I targeted Zendesk, ServiceDesk Plus, Freshservice who are providing IT solution to their clients and are able to satisfy them (on the basis of popularity)
I checked them on following parameters: Services they are offering to their customers, their target audience and areas they are lacking

Zendesk

Zendesk is the leading cloud-based help desk software built for better customer relationships. Solve tickets easily and support your customers on any channel text SMS, web, mobile app, phone, email, social media.

ServiceDesk Plus

ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus is a Help Desk and Asset Management Software. It offers an Integrated Package with Incident Management(Trouble Ticketing), Asset Tracking, Purchasing, Contract Management, Self-Service Portal, and Knowledge Base at an Affordable Price Point. ServiceDesk Plus provides all that you need to have a Full-Fledged IT Help Desk and a Productive Help Desk Staff. ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus is available in both On-Premise and On-Demand.

ServiceDesk Plus Customer feedback

Freshservice

Freshservice is an online IT Helpdesk with a fresh twist. The tool puts a refreshing user experience on top of powerful ticketing and asset management capabilities like auto-discovery of new resources, powerful configuration management and enhanced impact analysis. Incident, Problem, Change, Release & Knowledge Management are amongst the other features that make Freshservice, a perfect fit for your organization’s IT management needs.

Scope of work

Project objectives:

To streamline the process of communication between an employee and the IT help desk
To make the process of ticket solution more organised
To make the application self intuitive
Milestones:

Understanding — Project background, Competitive scanning, Requirement building(1st day)
Define stage —Scope of the project (1st day)
Design stage — Sketch, Wireframe, Visual design (2nd day)
Delivery date — 17th Nov 2019 (evening)
Deliverables: Mode of delivery: Medium article link

Expected Outcomes or Goals:

Track, manage, and prioritise tickets
IT Agent or admin should be able to prioritise tickets and assign ticket to other IT agents
A smooth and recorded communication channel between IT agent and employee
Design 2 key screens

Data Analysis

Before making the application, I checked on the fact that what type of data I am dealing with in the application. Following were the data points I investigated:

Tickets Indication

Traffic Issues- How many people can view the application at a time
Technical Issues- Determine if any page element is not loading or functioning properly
Data storage- What is the data source, where it is stored and how it will enter our application

User Feedback

Writing user (IT agent) needs

I need/want/expect a dynamic database on which the ticket is raised, assigned to agents and the status of the ticket is visible [what does the user want to do?]
So that I can track or monitor requests and help serve employees better [why does the user want to do this?]
A senior technical analyst [which type of user has this need?]
It is tough to track, record and cater so many requests received in the form of email [what triggers the user’s need?]
Tracking and prioritising is hard due to multiple request at a time [is the user constrained by any circumstances?]
There are 3 types of priority tickets: LOW, NORMAL, URGENT
With segregation of the type of ticket, you can easily know the status of the ticket and take further steps for it

User pain points

No defined process to monitor the status of requests received
No way to log past conversations or past served tickets
No prioritising leads to delay in resolution of ticket which are urgent and can impact business
Not able to delegate task to different agents on the basis of nature of requests and skill of the agent

Persona

User Journey Mapping ( John )

User Journey Mapping (Adam)

Sketches

High fidelity wireframes (IT agent view)

Visual Design (IT agent view)

Testing

If I complete this application then I would call 5 volunteers and give them tasks on the app to perform real time and closely monitor them. I would define a time taken on each task. If the time taken by volunteers exceed the standard set time, then I would improve that particular area.

Success and Failure

I would map my application to success status if it is able to solve user’s pain points/needs and satisfies my prior set goals
Also my success depends on the fact that the application satisfies all requirements set by me in the beginning
I would map my application to failure if the volunteers in testing phase are facing difficulties in performing tasks.
I would then fix all the failures in next launch of the application

Key Learnings

How to work in time constrained projects: The reason that I was able to deliver this task with so much detail was that I organised, prioritised and defined the time allocated on different components of my application