The Relationship Between Tech Support and UX Design

Three years ago, I worked in tech support for a software company. They create continuing education webinars for Bar and Medical Associations. Last week, I graduated from my UX Design Bootcamp. I’ve been thinking a lot about the people that would call into that software company’s support line. People called the support line when they couldn’t figure out how to access the classes they needed. State governments mandated the professionals take these classes to keep their licenses.

I had a short conversation with an old coworker who still works at this company about the site’s design. I discovered they’re inching towards a redesign of the online catalog. Following the conversation, I started looking through their website. I contemplated what I would do to redesign it.

If I had the resources I would want to work through the whole UX process on this site. But, unfortunately, I do not have the resources. A quick way to test usability is to complete a heuristic evaluation of the site. A heuristic evaluation would help me figure out if the site meets the standard usability principles. So I completed the evaluation, shown below.

Heuristic Evaluation completed for their site.

After the evaluation, I wrote some recommendations for improving the design’s site. The recommendations are listed below.

• Cleaning up the site’s design to make more minimal and aesthetically pleasing
• Adding more hierarchy when displaying content on pages
• Making the font larger so it’s easier to read especially on CTAs
• Adding emergency exits and help section to every page
• Providing character count micro-interaction when entering a password in the login form
• Card Sorting to determine labeling and site map for users

Taking these recommendations into account, I completed a new mockup of a proposed site. This mockup is shown below. Please note the larger primary CTA, the sign-in button, and a large Secondary CTA, the search bar.

The proposed redesign of their home page and course details page.

This exercise has me thinking a lot about tech support and UX and how they should work closer together. They’re both heavily based on empathizing with the user to solve their issues. I think one depends on the other. If the UX team does its job, the tech support team has less work to do. However, tech support teams would provide really good insights on users' frustrations as they work with users every day. I’m curious now if there are companies where the two teams work together to help the user.

Sources

Nielsen, J., 1994. 10 Heuristics For User Interface Design: Article By Jakob Nielsen. [online] Nielsen Norman Group. Available at: <https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/> [Accessed 14 April 2020].