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If you are working within an IT Service Management team, you have probably sat in many meetings where you are discussing how can we drive self-service portal adoption? You may have put up posters, sent out emails, tracked usage, redirected inbound service requests – and yet, you are not there – but why? Some teams are looking deeper and incorporating human-centered design to help drive IT Service Portal adoption.
Human-centered design is a creative approach to problem-solving that focuses on users’ needs and requirements by researching and observing how people use certain services, and identifying how their experience can be improved.
In human-centered design, it’s important to drop any preconceived notions you might have about users and their needs. Instead, you learn about users’ needs and challenges by observing and talking with them. Rather than having a specific outcome in mind, human-centered design calls for keeping your mind open to various possible solutions. This approach is one many organizations use when implementing self-service portals as part of their IT Service Management (ITSM) and Enterprise Service Management (ESM) strategies.
Human-centered design is based a few fundamental principles that are applicable to the implementation of an IT service portal within an organization. They are as follows:
Once you understand the principles, you can start the design process. To do this, you should follow the three phases that make up human-centered design:
At Grand Rapids Community College Kelley Webber, a support desk coordinator, saw the value in implementing a human-centered design approach to the college’s ITSM strategy. Establishing an IT service portal was supposed to make life easier for tech support staff because they wouldn’t have to spend as much time on the phone trying to understand the nature of users’ issues. However, Webber and her team found that fewer than 5 percent of support tickets were being initiated through the service portal, while 60 percent still originated through phone calls. They set out to redesign the service portal and service catalog to make it more user-centric so that more stakeholders would engage with it.
Employ a Focus Group
To do this, they shook up the format of the focus groups. “We had users sit down at a computer, and we watched them interact with our IT service catalog to see their reactions,” Webber says. “We realized many users didn’t understand the verbiage or icons we were using.”
For instance, the service portal had a category for “Telephony Services,” but most students didn’t understand this term. “They thought it was a made-up word,” Webber says. The newly redesigned portal will use the service catalog category “Campus Phones and Conferencing Services” instead.
Using User-Focused Vernacular
What’s more, end-users didn’t know they should choose the service category “Software Requests” if they had a problem with their mobile campus app, because they didn’t realize apps and software were the same things. “We had an old-school mentality that it was all just software,” Webber says. The redesigned portal will change the name of this service category to “Apps and Software” to make this clearer to users.
But the biggest lesson to come out of the focus groups was a reminder of why it’s important not to make assumptions. Webber and her team thought that simply redesigning the service portal would lead to greater use — yet they learned many students weren’t aware of its existence. “We never stopped to think whether students even knew how to get to it,” she acknowledges.
To read more about Grand Rapids Community College’s experience designing a user-friendly service portal, check out: Human-Centered Design Helps Grand Rapids Community College Engage with IT Users More Effectively.
With a well-designed portal in place, utilizing human-centered design, the next step is to build out your knowledge base. A knowledge base is a method of self-service that gives users the power to solve their own problems. It houses articles that contain documentation of common issues and provides solutions.
Knowledge bases are an incredibly valuable resource when thoughtfully created and managed well. Here are just a few benefits of having a knowledge base as part of your service portal:
As with human-centered design, building a knowledge base has its own methodologies – the most successful being Knowledge-Centered Service® (KCS). KCS is a methodology that provides businesses with a strategy to best solve problems through an abundance of available knowledge. The clear structure and framework of KCS allows for feedback and helps organizations to publish information more accurately.
Implementing Knowledge-Centered Service can involve a lot of moving parts. The following are six steps to help you get started:
Learn more about knowledge bases and TeamDynamix here.
This article was originally posted in February 2021 and has been updated with new information.
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