Client: Knowledge Commons (previously Humanities Commons)
Location: East Lansing, MI
My Role: UX Designer and User Communications Assistant
Client Overview:
Knowledge Commons, formerly known as Humanities Commons, is a dynamic network designed for knowledge creators across various disciplines. It serves as a platform that fosters interdisciplinary connections, promotes the sharing of open-access scholarship, and facilitates access to teaching materials. Users can build WordPress websites, enabling them to showcase their work and increase its impact by sharing it within the Knowledge Commons repository. By supporting collaboration and resource sharing, Knowledge Commons aims to enhance the visibility and accessibility of scholarly work, empowering researchers, educators, and creators to engage with a broader audience and contribute to the advancement of knowledge in their fields.
Objective:
The objective of this project was to redesign the help center for Knowledge Commons to enhance user experience, reduce help requests, and improve accessibility. By analyzing user pain points and applying user-centered design principles, the goal was to create an intuitive resource that empowers users to find solutions independently while enhancing their engagement with the platform.
As a UX Designer and User Communications Assistant at Knowledge Commons, I was responsible for redesigning the help center to decrease user help requests and improve the overall user experience. My primary tasks included conducting an in-depth analysis of the existing help center, identifying key user pain points, and ensuring that the information provided was informative, accessible, and efficiently directed toward helping users. Collaborating with cross-functional teams, I developed wireframes and prototypes to refine the design, ultimately implementing changes that enhanced usability and empowered users to find solutions independently.
The target audience for the Knowledge Commons help center includes a diverse range of users, primarily scholars, researchers, educators, and students from various disciplines. These users seek guidance and support in navigating the platform, utilizing its resources effectively, and addressing any issues they encounter. Given their varying levels of technical proficiency, it is essential that the help center caters to both novice and experienced users, providing clear, accessible information that meets their unique needs. Additionally, the audience may include interdisciplinary collaborators looking to connect with others in their fields and share their work. By understanding this diverse audience, the redesigned help center aims to create a user-friendly experience that enhances engagement and facilitates knowledge sharing.
Upon reviewing the existing help center, it was clear that several improvements were necessary to enhance the user experience. I noticed a lack of relevant images, which hindered engagement and made the content feel less inviting. The navigational layout needed restructuring to provide a more intuitive flow, ensuring users could easily locate the information they sought.
Additionally, the informational architecture was disorganized, making it challenging for users to find the most relevant resources quickly. I recognized the importance of displaying critical information prominently, allowing users to access essential guidance without unnecessary effort. These initial observations guided my approach to redesigning the help center, focusing on creating a more visually appealing and user-friendly experience.
To inform my redesign of the help center, I conducted a benchmarking analysis of other successful help centers. I found that LinkedIn's clean and intuitive layout effectively utilized iconography to guide users through their navigation, enhancing usability. Their strategy of including related links at the bottom of help pages was particularly impressive, as it directed users to relevant solutions without requiring extensive searching.
Similarly, Medium’s use of iconography was beneficial, but what stood out was their inclusion of examples beneath each section. This approach clarified the types of information users could expect to find and highlighted frequently used help links, making it easier for users who might not know precisely what they were looking for to find their answers quickly.
These insights inspired my initial ideas for the help center redesign, focusing on a clean layout, the strategic use of visual elements, and the inclusion of contextual navigation aids to enhance user experience and accessibility.
In my sitemap analysis, I meticulously laid out the entire help center site map, highlighting links with the same color under corresponding main and sub-navigational links. This exercise revealed several key insights that would inform the redesign. I discovered numerous repeating navigational links across various categories, indicating a need for better organization and clearer titles to enhance user flow.
Moreover, I noticed that there was no systematic approach to listing the help center pages; they were neither alphabetized nor arranged by relevance or frequency of clicks. This lack of structure could lead to user frustration and inefficiency when searching for information. Recognizing these issues emphasized the importance of considering user actions and behaviors when organizing the help center pages, ultimately guiding the development of a more intuitive and user-centric navigational system.
The analysis of the user support request log spreadsheet was instrumental in identifying the most frequent help requests from users. This extensive data set revealed several significant insights into user challenges. One prominent issue was that many users had educational email addresses that changed frequently based on their university affiliations, leading to a high volume of requests for assistance with updating their account email addresses.
Additionally, the data highlighted a recurring difficulty with the registration process, suggesting the necessity for a more streamlined onboarding experience that effectively guides new users through the site’s features. Lastly, there was a notable number of help requests related to building sites within the platform, indicating a demand for more comprehensive resources tailored to first-time WordPress users. These insights emphasized the need for targeted improvements in the help center to address common user pain points and enhance their overall experience.
During my analysis of the contact form, I recognized an opportunity to enhance our understanding of user needs by optimizing the data collection process. By incorporating more descriptive help request categories, we could gain deeper insights into the specific types of assistance users require, enabling us to tailor our support more effectively.
Additionally, expanding the form to include demographic fields—such as whether the user is a student, teacher, or scholar—would allow us to gather valuable information that could inform our communication and support strategies. Furthermore, implementing conditional fields that appear based on user input would facilitate a more streamlined request process, enabling us to collect detailed information relevant to each user’s help request. These enhancements would not only improve our data collection efforts but also empower us to create a more responsive and user-centric help center.
In the wireframing phase, I focused on creating multiple versions of the help center homepage, as it serves as the cornerstone for the main navigation and informational architecture of the entire site. Understanding that the homepage design would set the tone for user interactions throughout the help center, I experimented with various methods for displaying navigation information and organizing content.
Each wireframe iteration incorporated different layouts and visual hierarchies to explore how users might best access and engage with the information they need. By presenting these diverse designs to the team for analysis, we could gather valuable feedback on which elements resonated most with our target audience. This collaborative approach ensured that the final design would be both intuitive and effective in guiding users to the resources they seek.
During the prototyping phase, we refined the final homepage design, which successfully integrated a combination of iconography and organized subsections to provide users with a comprehensive overview of the various solutions available. Recognizing from our user research that most help requests originated from searches rather than navigation, we placed significant visual emphasis on the search bar to facilitate easy access to information.
Additionally, we aimed for a uniform layout across the different help pages, enhancing user familiarity and ease of navigation. Relevant images were strategically incorporated to guide users visually through their solutions, making the experience more engaging. To further empower users to find answers independently, we included related links on each help page, allowing them to explore additional resources without the need to submit a help request. This thoughtful design approach aimed to streamline the user experience, making it as efficient and effective as possible.
The transition from Humanities Commons to Knowledge Commons marked a significant rebranding that influenced the visual design of the platform. The new name more accurately represented its mission of fostering collaboration among knowledge creators across disciplines.
As I was implementing the final design into WordPress, the rebranding took shape, resulting in changes to the color palette and overall design system. While the architecture of the design changes I made remained consistent, these updates enhanced the platform's visual identity, aligning it more closely with its renewed purpose.
Once my prototype had been finalized and refined based on the team's feedback, I began implementing the new changes to the help center. Since the entirety of Knowledge Commons is hosted on WordPress, this platform facilitated an efficient implementation of the solutions I had developed. This process involved updating the entire help center, including the main navigation and all associated help pages, ensuring a seamless transition from the old design to the new, user-focused layout.
The redesigned help center is now fully operational, significantly enhancing the way users navigate to their solutions on Knowledge Commons. This new platform provides a more intuitive and efficient experience, enabling users to access the information they need with ease.
Throughout this project, I strengthened my skills in transforming a design from wireframe to an interactive website within WordPress. Additionally, I gained valuable insights from working in dual roles as both the designer and the implementer, allowing me to better understand the intricacies of user experience design and development.
Following the completion of this project, Knowledge Commons remains committed to continuously improving the user experience of the website. They will continue to analyze user help requests and gather feedback to refine their offerings further, ensuring the help center evolves in line with user needs and expectations.