SPICEWORKS HELP DESK App
Spiceworks is a platform for IT Pros consisting of a social community, educational content, product reviews and free apps like Help Desk, Inventory & Network Monitoring. Basically everything an IT Pros needs to do their job.
The Spiceworks Help Desk App was badly in need of attention. It needed a UX audit to see how interactions could be improved as well as a facelift and re-organization with the introduction of the new UI Style Guide that had been created. This was a high use app so we had to be wary of each change we made and make sure this would help the user do their work more efficiently. We also wanted to leverage the Spiceworks social community’s expertise by introducing ticket sharing with other IT Pros.
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I needed to start with observing our users use the Help Desk in it’s current state to get a feel for where the biggest issues and opportunities might be to make it more efficient. After that round of observation I created a few design priorities to aid iterations for this project.
What I quickly learned through observation was almost every single interaction or change you made to a Help Desk ticket took 3 steps more that it should. I huge part of this project would be finding ways to decrease the number of clicks necessary to make changes to a ticket.
There were two resources from the Spiceworks Community that would also be helpful in this process. The first was the “Requested Features” area and the second was the going through the most commonly added plugins to the Help Desk created by IT Pros in the Spiceworks community. I could dig through these pages to see what might be good to change and interview those users who made comments to dig in further.
From this point I felt like I had plenty of research to start ideating on new layouts and improvements and begin the process of testing wireframes and eventually higher resolution designs.
After observing IT Pros use the app as they would on a daily basis, discussing their needs for a help desk ticketing system, and getting their feedback on some early ideas we saw a huge opportunity to make editing ticket fields more simple as well as organizing the ticket view in a way that helped with scanability. We moved the most commonly edited fields into a section between a new more readable title/actions bar for quick editing using in-place editing and more interesting ways to quickly change due dates and add time for labor tracking.
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