5 Principles for Designing Support Websites

I recently co-presented a webinar about support website design in which I discussed 5 principles for successful design. You can listen to the recording here to get the full experience, including exploring Automation Anywhere’s award-winning site.

Here are the 5 principles, for your reading pleasure.

Simplicity. Most website users are not daily users. Also, they don’t read, they skim and graze. Offering a simple, streamlined experience makes for more successful users. Simplicity includes exposing only a few options at a time, with a well thought-out hierarchy that highlights the most important, most useful, and more used items. 

Effective Content Strategy. Creating a beautiful, well thought-out website is important, but “content is king”. To deliver great self-service, you need a good knowledge management strategy to continuously refresh and augment the information on the site. 

Personalization. Especially if your user base is heterogeneous, or you have a wide range of products, it helps to personalize the site by allowing the users to define what they are interested in. Even better, pre-filter the information they see by default, based on what you already know about their purchase history.

Strong Design Methodology. It can be tempting to just dive in and start mocking up pages. But even for smaller websites it’s very useful to structure the project to avoid multiple redos. The FT Works team uses this four-step process.

• Architecture: We start by defining the user personas. Are we seeing end-users? Sysadmins? Decision makers?  What is the scope of the product line? Some of our clients have hundreds of products, sometimes so heterogeneous that it makes sense to have multiple websites! And what are the users trying to accomplish on the site, distinguishing between essential tasks and less common tasks. Once we understand all that, we create the architecture (tree) for the website, showing the various pages, functionality available on the pages, and the paths through the site.
• Wireframes. The second step is to create simplified versions of the pages that show the placement of the various elements. This helps us refine layout and links without having to obsess about each pixel. It’s also an opportunity to refine the terminology we use–and we like to hold user tests at this point, to make sure that the users can easily navigate to what they need.
• Design. Third, we create detailed layouts for the major pages. Usually we lavish extra care on the landing page, where a lot happens, and a handful of pages with important functionality. The idea here is to give the programmers an exact picture of what they need to create. 
• Implementation. The final step is to actually code the site, QA it, and launch it.

AI Adoption Strategy. As mentioned in earlier posts, search and chatbots have improved tremendously by integrating AI functionality that makes them more flexible and accurate. Don’t miss out.

What other principles would you add to this list?

(And if you need help revamping your support site, contact us.)