Next - Professional project (2019)
New FAQ pages project
Concept development and project management of new FAQ style pages to replace old style help microsite
My placement year at Next gave me the opportunity to work on a number of projects and improvements. This is an example of one that I led from the start. The problem was that the customer information and support pages were based on an old system, and as such were not user friendly, particularly on mobile (majority of Next web traffic).
Background of the problem
Customers visiting the help section of the website, were abandoning their basket at abnormally high rates. When I investigated, I found that not only was the site not optimised for mobile in any way, the information itself was laid out poorly and illogically. Compounding this was the lack of backward navigation leaving customers five pages deep into a microsite with no direct route back to the main website. As part of the international team, another concern was the high use of text within images, which increases turnaround time for the crawl based translation system. For these reasons I decided to pitch a better solution.
The solution
My proposal was for a simple mobile friendly FAQ style page, that would not only be contained within the main site, and be easier for customers to navigate, but also easier to manage. With the page in HTML text, the translation crawl software would complete translation without manual intervention, drastically reducing the overhead needed for changes. In addition, implementation would be helped by the ability to use a template based system, changing only the necessary elements between countries.
I pitched the project successfully at all the necessary levels, engaging all the relevant teams. I was made project manager for this program and delivered before the agreed deadline.
Project challenges
Most of the challenges for this project came about due to having limited resources and other ongoing projects needing the required teams' attention. One of the key challenges was not having design resource to fully code the page, I solved this problem by sitting with the team to build my HTML knowledge, and coded the outstanding parts of the template myself. This significantly improved my knowledge in this area, to the extent that I was able to successfully deliver the training to the content team.