Pearson is a multinational publishing and education company headquartered in London. At the time, I was a UX consultant on a programme updating and consolidating Pearson's web presence following the rollout of a new content management system - Adobe Experience Manager. One of the items I was asked to look into was the online support for products and services.
For a Pearson customer, finding support material could be difficult as it was often scattered across many different websites. This had been a concern for the business for some time and various attempts had been made to remedy this however the piecemeal nature of these previous attempts only added to the fragmentation that defined the experience as it was.
Given the previous failed attempts to address this issue there was hesitation to try something again without confidence that things would be done differently this time. With this in mind, the ask was for us to investigate the problem and then use user-centred design to create some conceptual designs for how we would address the identified user pain-points. This in turn would be presented to senior stakeholders with the aim of getting support for a wider initiative to properly overhaul the customer support experience.
One of the first things we did was a stocktake of all the Pearson websites providing support material for its products and services. This helped us get a better understanding of the scale of the problem and would also help us make our case when presenting back to the business.
The broken online support model was not only impacting customers but also Pearson staff, in particular, sales representatives and support teams. We held interviews with these teams to better understand the challenges they were facing as a result of this fragmented supported model. From these interviews, our key findings were that sales representatives were spending too much time helping customers with support issues rather than selling more products, and that support staff were spending too much time helping customers with simple support issues such as password resets.
Given the nature of this assignment, it was not practical to cover all of the different possible customer types. It was therefore agreed with the programme sponsor that we would focus on the "higher education course instructor". Our sales representatives put us in touch with customers fitting that profile and we set up interviews. From these interviews we were able to learn more about their journey when adopting a Pearson product. At a high level, the journeys and associated support requirements can be split into pre and post product adoption along with a further split between information the instructor needs access to themselves and information they need to share with their students.
Another useful insight came from the analytics team which showed that most product support journeys started from a product page - not a dedicated support website.
Our initial designs presented support information directly from the product's information page. Feedback to this was generally positive with users saying it made sense for some of the support content to be presented here however it was also pointed out that some of the support information is only available for those who had actually adopted the product and so wouldn't be available here.
In addition to this, some of a product's support content (e.g. how to register and sign in to the online learning platform) is also included in a list of items the educator needs to share with students when a course starts. This meant that there was an opportunity to create a more personalised and streamlined experience with the next design iteration focussed more on the user, the product(s) they have adopted and their key activities after adopting a Pearson product.
Based on this broader understanding of an educator's journey with Pearson, our next design iteration evolved into a personalised portal where a customer can view the products they have adopted from Pearson. From this they are able to view important product-related content (including support), as well as perform key tasks. These tasks include: designing classes and supporting materials, assembling and sharing ordering lists for students, sharing course materials, and sharing support content for the digital/online components of the course.
The project was concluded with a final presentation to senior stakeholders that included a summary of how broken the existing model was, what we learned through discovery, and our vision of a portal that not only simplified the support experience - but also helped customers more easily perform key tasks when they adopt a Pearson product.
This was well received and we got a lot of positive feedback from the group. Although it was clear that this project was more conceptual and that there would be a lot more detail to work through, our designs demonstrated how a user-centred design process could be used to properly address the problems both Pearson staff and customers were experiencing rather than just spin up another support site.
It is clear our first design iteration didn't quite cut it - especially compared to subsequent designs. At first I felt like this was a failure of our discovery and in hindsight this might be true - I probably would do things a bit differently if I had my time again. But upon further reflection this project was a good example of failing fast and how it is a valid and effective way to design. This can be hard for me, I hate being wrong. But sharing early designs, even if they are rough or incomplete, gives people something tangible to react to. Sometimes it's easier to spot if something is wrong rather than know what "right" is. It can also spark new ideas and help us design something better - it did in this project.
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