Crunchbase

Problem

Crunchbase’s Customer Experience (CX) team was receiving too many tickets from customers regarding issues that could easily be troubleshooted via their self-service system—Knowledge Center (KC). Thus, users were having difficulty accessing the information they needed quickly and efficiently.

Challenge and Research

My team was assigned to assess the KC’s information architecture and generate a usability study to identify current pain points, cognitive mapping behaviors, and how to optimize the KC’s user experience.

To investigate the problem, we used a mixed-methods approach to determine the severity of user concerns. We began with a heuristic evaluation of the current KC, then recruited participants to complete a card sorting activity to determine the mental mapping of the KC’s categories and articles. Finally, we recruited participants fitting our target personas to complete a treejack test of the new information architecture we generated from the card sorting results.

Synthesis

In total, we had 58 participants complete our card sorting activity, along with 7 participants complete the treejack exercise. The findings suggested the KC had room for improvement of its organization and how it labels categories.

During the card sorting activity, participants organized articles to incorrect categories 50% of the time, based on the KC’s current structure. After completing an affinity map and reviewing the data, we found that participants relied on key words and terms to bundle articles into categories even when the topic of the article wasn’t relevant to the perceived category.

Design Recommendations

When it came to interaction design, we recommended the KC incorporated more visual elements to reduce the overload of text links with similar terms and words to make concepts clear to understand. Additionally, prioritizing the most common FAQs on the landing page to offer shortcuts.

Additionally, because users had a difficult time knowing what category articles were located on category landing pages, we identified potential sub-categories during our treejack studies. Sub-categories can reduce the confusion users experienced due to vague terminologies and provide a more accurate structuring to categories.

Takeaways & Next Steps

After our team presented our findings to the CX team, they took our results into consideration and implemented some of our recommendations into the KC’s design updates. This included the incorporation of visual elements to simplify sections, breaking the landing page into chunks rather than a list of items, and incorporating a static FAQs section on the landing page that allows users to quickly access common inquiries.

If I were to continue on this project, I would want to dive deeper into user habits when communicating with customer support for more data related to concerns as well as testing the actual KC page as we were limited to only testing information architecture via card sort and treejack exercises. I would also like to gather support call/chat recordings and transcripts to target specific pain points and learn more about which user personas rely on Crunchbase’s customer support team to resolve issues.