My role

This was a side-project that I identified and pursued on my own as a half-time role for a few months during my time on the Support team.  I created the concept, spoke with potential users and stakeholders to identify pain-points and create a hypothesis, designed the information architecture and interface, and coded the beginnings of the MVP using HTML, CSS/Sass, and JavaScript/Angular.js.
 

The users

This project was originally intended for use by HubSpot Support, however, the potential users are not limited to this specific department.  All HubSpot employees can find benefit from a tool such as this, especially customer-facing individuals on the Services team who are often under pressure from customers to quickly find an answer to their questions.
 

The problem

HubSpot Customer Support Specialists (and other HubSpot employees) need a way to find answers to HubSpot product and company questions in one centralized location.  These answers are currently scattered across 8 or more different resources, and finding the solutions to questions is often a very time-consuming and convoluted process.  This also tends to result in the duplication of content across resources—especially with regards to Slack conversations.
 

The hypothesis

We believe that by aggregating HubSpot-related resources in one location for Support reps (and other employees) to search, we will increase team productivity and enable individuals to more quickly and easily find answers to questions.

We will know this to be true when Support reps report an increase in self-service on cases, and we see a correlation between a decrease in visits/searches on resource index pages and an increase in visits/searches on the Omni-Search itself.
 

Discovery phase

The discovery phase of this project was mostly comprised of anecdotal observations from my time in Support.  Due to the fact that I was on the floor, constantly listening to and helping my fellow Support reps, I noticed that we struggle with keeping track of specific resources that are beneficial when trying to troubleshoot Support cases. Additionally, we tend to re-ask the same questions repeatedly, due to the constant rotation of Support reps entering and leaving the department. Often, knowing where to find information is half the battle, and because the answers to many HubSpot questions are spread among so many different resources, there is a high barrier to entry before reps can recognize where a previous answer may be.  These sentiments were confirmed by candid conversations.
 

Ideation phase

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Design phase

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The results

Initial feedback was very positive, but the project was put on permanent hiatus due to Support volume at the time.  I would love to eventually pick this project back up, or pass it onto to another individual.

Next steps

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