Aims and Objectives

The Sky help and support call centre takes thousands of daily calls, offering support on everything from billing to broadband. Whilst some of these calls can only be dealt with via a call centre, a large proportion are issues that the customer could resolve themselves.

To reduce the number of calls, customers are encouraged to self-serve where possible, using the website as a first point of call.

Sky already had many online guides, tools and forums available for customers. Still, as the number and complexity of the principles had grown, the existing help and support website became harder to use for customers seeking help, resulting in more calls to the call centre. As with many sites, mobile traffic also increased yearly, so the site needed to be responsive.

When users searched for guides via an external search engine, the guides all ranked highly and (analytics suggested) were easily found. The internal Sky.com search engine had also undergone a significant overhaul, so customers searching for information were also being well served.

Therefore, the key to the project's success was redesigning the website and guides responsively and surfacing routes into the guides at appropriate points in the customer information-seeking journey.

My role on this project was Senior UX working collaboratively with a UI designer and a Scrum team of front and back-end developers.

Method

The help and support section had been through several iterations in its lifespan, and we had a pretty good idea of how the new site should function based on previous research that had been done. However, I wanted to make sure we learned as much as we could from not only competitors but also from other companies who also offer online support and guidance. I looked at several companies, including electronics manufacturers, mobile phone companies and others both in the UK and overseas, to see what we could learn.

Card Sort

As a team, we decided to use a robust taxonomy to help surface relevant information to customers on the index pages and the guides themselves to ensure that customers were never stuck at a dead end and always had other relevant content to look at.

The first step in this process was to conduct an online card sort as I wanted to understand more about customers’ understanding of the titles given to the guides and how customers mentally grouped the principles. I used Userzoom for this because stakeholders at Sky put a lot of value on quantitive evidence, and this was the easiest way to get the card sort in front of hundreds of people in a short space of time.

The outcome of this helped form the basis of the taxonomy, which was refined and added to as the project progressed.

Tree Test

The key question we wanted to answer was whether customers preferred to refine the list of guides by product (e.g. broadband) or intent (e.g. setting up) when looking for help via the support homepage.

Following on from the card sort, I wanted to validate some of the assumptions about the intent vs product question. I wanted to test the various options available to us, but I specifically wanted to get an answer to this question without potentially influencing the outcomes by introducing user interfaces, so I decided to conduct a tree test.

The tree test measured participants’ routes through variations of a potential IA. The options testing included product only, intent only and a hybrid based on the taxonomy of the old website. Again using Userzoom, I was able to test with hundreds of people.

Participants were shown one variation of the tree test with the same ten tasks, and the outcomes were measured and compared against each other.

Click Test

Another testing technique I used was click-testing potential design routes. Mockups of possible design interfaces were produced, and participants were shown one design option but asked the same question. During these tests, I was looking for feedback on the chosen design direction and the labelling and language used in the designs.

Prototyping

As usual, with this kind of project, I produced numerous versions of wireframes exploring different interface options and ideas, some of which were interactive. Wireframes were only going to give us part of the answer, though and although we usability tested some early wireframes with customers, it was essential to prototype using the taxonomy as soon as possible and see how they used the interface to find answers to the tasks we set them. Working with the team developers, we quickly mocked up some design interfaces that plugged directly into the new taxonomy, making the prototypes as realistic as possible. This was a great way of demoing our ideas to stakeholders in the organisation and also to be used for usability testing.

Usability Testing

We were working on two week sprints, and as part of this process, we also tested with customers during each sprint. Sky conducts regular testing sessions in an observation studio in central London, so I got prototypes tested at each project stage. After each round of testing, I analysed the feedback and presented it back to the team during the sprint retrospective. The testing outcomes were then used to help prioritise the backlog in the following sprint.

AB Testing

Because the Sky.com website has millions of unique visitors each month, it’s relatively easy to get quick feedback on design decisions through AB testing. Once we had settled on an interface, we could implement the more minor design decisions, measure the results and tweak the website accordingly.

Outcomes

The website was designed, built and launched within three months. The new website was responsible for reducing the number of calls to the call centre, which represented a significant reduction in operating costs for Sky.