Adobe
Fall 2018 - 2019
Internship
During my internship at Adobe Systems, I had the opportunity to work with a team of developers to design for Robohelp 2019 — a technical authoring platform. I worked on developing responsive web templates to help clients organize extensive information into a coherent knowledge base interface.
RoboHelp is Adobe’s technical authoring tool used by corporations to design and format their web based user guides and online customer support material. RoboHelp offers templates that technical authors may use to organize their content (text, image, and video).
Launched in August, 2019
Goal
Following a drastic change in UI for RoboHelp 2019, the aim of this project was to re-work and re-think the templates that were offered with the new update and to expand the range of functions a technical author could perform.
Understanding the user
I conducted research at two levels - identifying the trends and user needs in the sphere of customer service, and benchmarking products that offer extensive reading and browsing services.
I saw that the industry was moving towards a self service approach. People were more inclined to find answers online; contacting a customer representative presented a high friction experience with the possibility of lengthy delays.
Addressing user needs
Since RoboHelp is a B2B product, I worked with two sets of users — the enterprise technical authors using the tool and the consumers using the end product (knowledge base website). The design needed to address two sets of user needs to improve on the process of setting up the website and the consumer facing browsing experience.
With the enterprise needs in mind - I began to construct a modular and responsive design that would allow the technical authors to customize the template based on the features they want to include. For example, removing the table of contents, breadcrumbs or anchor links will not affect the basic structure of the layout.
Building a centralized hub
In order to cater to the increasing demand for self service in the industry I wanted to deviate from previous RoboHelp templates which focused on articles as the sole source of information. I decided to design a help center which would act as a one stop shop for multiple resources.
Next steps
The growing need for self service pushes the industry to further explore technologies for automating the customer service experience. While features such as chatbots offer the ideal solution, subtle approaches to refined recommendation algorithms and smart search are equally useful. Were I to continue working on this problem — I would look to incorporate more of these features in an effort to minimize the cognitive load for our users.