The Citrix GoToAssist team wanted to explore potential ways of creating solutions for customer care related to software products. I helped the team explore this space using exploratory research and participatory design methods.
Exploratory research
In order to understand the goals, needs, and pain points of our users, I interviewed eight customer care representatives and observed interviews with 11 software users about giving and receiving tech support. I used the insights from these interviews to create archetypes.
Generating ideas
Based on the goals and pain points we discovered, I created a set of needs statements for our users.
Then, my team and I had a fun, fast-paced brainstorming and sketching session (fancy pens and colors help make everyone feel like an artist!).
Concept testing
Based on the top ideas from the sketching session, I created seven storyboards to use for concept testing with more customer care representatives.
The participants gave us great insights into which ideas would be most useful, which features they liked, and what could be improved. In fact, we iterated on the concepts and did a second round of testing with the best concepts.
Final participant feedback
Participatory design
In order to go deeper into the needs of people receiving tech support, I hosted a participatory design event for participants to express themselves creatively. You can read more about what worked (and what I'd do differently next time) in my Medium post.
Principles & Recommendations
From the insights that came out of the participatory design session, I created a set of principles around how to create the best experience for people receiving tech support.
While experimental and fuzzy, taking this human-centered design approach and working outside of our normal roadmap resulted in some positive outcomes:
Exciting and innovative ideas based on real user needs
Deep insights into users that we didn't know very well before
A couple specific ideas that we explored during our annual Hack Week (including a new product concept that I worked on)