Computacenter worked with Bunnyfoot to carry out a thorough research and design project to guide usability and optimise the user experience of their Next Generation Service Desk (NGSD). This resulted in an award-winning service which has helped their customers as well as ultimately benefiting their organisation.

What Computacenter Wanted

• Focus on and understand the vision of the needs of the user rather than solely the business
• The key objective was to encourage IT support self service and to reduce the number of support calls to contact centres
• Understand the key motivations, needs and expectations of service desk users
• Identify keys journeys and tasks of the service desk user and use this to create personas
• Identify the ways in which customers approach service desks to seek support as well as their desire to “self-serve” and avoid this contact
• Determine the use and understanding of terminology to inform labelling and taxonomy decisions

The Work

To meet these objectives, we performed a full user-centred design project, employing a range of activities from our service offering. Working within agile process with Computacenter’s key stakeholders, activities included:

• Depth interviews across a range of departments within an enterprise-level organisation to understand their context of use with support services. 25 one-on-one interviews were carried out for 30 minutes each with participants from UK and Germany. 10 telephone interviews (4 from Germany and 6 from UK) and 15 face to face interviews (All UK)
• Onsite immersion at an IT support call centre, observing and interviewing technical support staff, to understand the nature of calls they receive, the problems they need to address and the systems they use
• Online surveys were carried out with UK and German audiences to uncover quantitative insights into their behaviours and attitudes towards IT support services. Close to 1,000 people completed the survey
• Sketch Personas were created from the research outputs to focus design activities around the key user types of IT support services and their needs
• Iterative Design – starting with initial paper-based sketches and user journey mapping, through to medium fidelity wireframes and a clickable prototype
• Two rounds of task-based online testing with participants using clickable Axure prototypes. Included 12 participants in 30-minute sessions. Findings were incorporated back into the design process to refine the prototype
• Graphic Design – turning the final wireframes into an elegant, white label design product that Computacenter could sell to their clients

The Results

• Hitting the target of over 50% shift from phone to online within weeks of launch
• Maintaining approximately 20% 7-day active users since launch plus over 80% of all users using the solution – a true demonstration of users voting with their feet
• Computacenter won ‘Best Managed Service Desk’ award at the Service Desk Institute’s ‘IT Service & Support Awards’ for this project