I joined JustAnswer when one of the primary goals of the year was to improve our experts’ work quality on the platform. The factors to improve that was the app where they talk to customers on a daily basis. The company significantly has grown and changed in the last 6 years but the app remained untouched and definitely needed a new approach.
Role
I was a Senior UX Designer on an agile team comprised of product manager, analysts, developers and quality engineers. My goal was to redesign the app to make the daily job more convenient for experts. I was responsible for determining the overall direction of the project collaborating with a team and other company departments. I did user research, prototyping and UI design.
Research
Some research has already been done before I joined the company thus I had at my disposal interview video recordings, interview notes and personas. But I realized that I need to feel experts’ problems on the own skin. That’s why I registered as an expert and tried to answer customers’ questions. Same time I designed a customer journey map to see experts’ problems more clearly and define opportunities for improvement.
Insights we found during the research:
Experts use text editors to prepare canned answers for the frequently asked questions.
To send a message as a final answer experts had to select a corresponding checkbox. Many experts forget to do that so the chat remains open and they don’t get a chance to be rated by customers, which leads to problems with payoffs.
Too late response as result customer left the chat or changed the expert.
Cutomer’s late response to the expert’s follow up question that led to closing chat from the expert side.
Sometimes experts’ met questions they already answered once but forgot all the details.
Before I could jump into designing, it was important to define principles for the future version of the app.
Fast. Experts can easily find the questions they are able to answer. Also, they can answer the question in a fast and efficient manner.
Comfort.
Experts shouldn’t be afraid of losing any important information that could benefit the future.
I partnered with another UX designer who previously worked with experts to brainstorm ideas.
Solution
Everything in a single window
Request center and chat have been combined in a single app window, so no more switching between browser tabs. How it was
Views adopted to the expert task.
The first view from the top is focused on requests list scanning by the expert, we don’t show chat section there. Second is a split view when an expert can accomplish two tasks, scan a requests list and answer a question. The third view shows opened chats only. And the last is a view to save questions for later review.
Quick responses
Interviews with experts have shown that they use separate text editors like google docs to collect prepared answers for some questions. That way experts could provide the user with a faster response. So I decided to include this feature to the text entering area as a dropdown list with quick responses.
Search archive
Sometimes chatting with a user, the expert realizes that he already answered a similar question in the past and would be great to refresh it in his memory. For that reason, I suggested a 'search archive' feature where an expert could enter a topic or answer keywords and get access to related archived chats.
Conclusion
The prototype received positive feedback from users. To measure success we wanted to track the metrics like:
Average answer time by the expert
Expert’s rating score change
System usability scale
NPS
At this stage, due to company priorities change, I had to join another team responsible for users retention and put the project on hold.
