Zendesk

Zendesk is the leading global SAAS company for customer support. It owns numerous CRM products that work together to enhance remote customer service and organize support teams. Their most well-known interface might be the Help widget that floats on the bottom left corner of numerous websites globally, but under the hood, Zendesk's most powerful capabilities come in the form of Support Agent tools and the Admin capabilites that configure the workflows and functions of that team.

See it live at: Zendesk.com

Experience Design Lead

With over 16 offices worldwide, and more than 6 products under their belt, Zendesk's growth has meant that there is a need to ensure experiences, features and designs across products and regions remain consistent and optimal. To serve this need, I was hired as one of 8 new, technical design leads that would work horizontally across the business and products to ensure a consistent experience for their end users. The goal was to improve seamlessness across products, devices, and platforms by developing a user experience vision, design strategy, and cross-team practices for product designers in my space.

  • Role & Responsibilities:
  • Connect, manage & align design quality and experience solutions horizontally between Zendesk designers, products, teams and project roadmaps.
  • Set the vision and strategy for End User experiences and architecture across all products.
  • Design overarching features, and shared experiences that cut across multiple End-User products.
  • Drive multi-product research initiatives, interaction patterns, and joint-artefacts in the End User space.
  • Drive collaboration practices & solution alignment between End User designers across 5 offices, and 7 products.
  • Improve design output quality in the End User space by helping designers identify design assumptions, disjointed points, and inconsistencies between different features and products.
  • Advocate for, and lead the end user space through cross departmental relationships with strategy, engineering architects engineers, product and marketing.
  • Outcomes & Achievements:
  • Set the Vision for the ideal End User experience across all our products - driving and mapping the user flow through our products.
  • Redesigned an improved administration set up of Zendesk embeddables, and improved control choice for these tasks.
  • Contributed to the IA restructure of these Admin settings and proposed a 'One Zendesk' concept
  • Explored & developed the Embeddables Settings IA for Admin Center (centralizing 3-4 separate product settings).
  • Identified the End User lenses, and started the persona profiles in this space.
  • Worked with each product's designer to define & establish End User Experience Principles for our products.
  • Began the documentation of key end user components to frame the guidelines for interaction elements across our end user interfaces.
  • Worked at the Experience Leadership level to organise our leadership offsite and the establishment of standardised practices across experience streams globally.

Projects & Details

Project

Widget Admin V2

To bolster our earlier attempts at improving the setup process of our Web Widget via the admin panel, this project involved a detailed heuristic audit of the end to end process, with all possible entry points through this process. Major setup tasks were identified and a redesign of both IA, the flow through these tasks and redesign of interfaces & individual controls, was undertaken.

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Strategic Leadership

End User Vision & Experience Principles

Taking the gamut of our End User facing products, and bringing together of all relevant designers to facilitate the documentation and reimagining of the full journey across our capapbilities. This journey formed both the North Star vision for End User experience across all products, but also identified and defined our End User experience principles.

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Design Leadership

Operations & Practices

EUX syncs and critiques, Design processes and frameworks, Principles & Vision, Experience audits, Documentation of Design thinking & element library, Experience leads group involvement and organization.

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Culture

Community

Being part of a great company culture means having opportunities to contribute to other meaningful projects outside your work - at Zendesk, I continue my passion for waste-reduction via the Sustainability group; gender equality and the participation of women in STEM, via the Women In Engineering group, and contribute here and there to make people team and project logos just because :)

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