Context

Mailchimp’s Help Center is a high-traffic site that provides self-service help and support content. The site contains over 600 articles that guide users through onboarding and using the email marketing platform. Most users find this content by searching for answers to specific questions, rather than navigating through the site.

Problem

The Help Center was designed without accounting for user journeys or navigability, relying on the search box as the primary path for users to access content. This led to topical landing pages with dozens of links to pages in no particular order. Users who landed on a page via search had no path to find related content and no way to know what to do next. This led to frustration and forced users to reach out to support when they reached a dead end.

What I did

As Senior Content Strategist for the Technical Content team, I collaborated closely with an external design agency to assess and redesign the site’s core landing pages and information architecture. I created card sort activities and implemented a Treejack test to define a new site structure. I launched a usability study to benchmark the existing site and repeated the study with a design prototype.

As a stopgap to help users find more relevant content while the site was being redesigned, I curated learning paths (Quick Start Guides) for new users, more advanced users, and specific user segments (e-commerce, for example). These landing pages could be shared as resources to allow users to find all relevant content in one place, rather than performing piecemeal searches.

Outcomes

After the engagement with the design vendor ended, organizational changes meant that the site updates were never fully launched. I was still able to repeat the usability test with an interactive prototype and show significant improvements in site usability.

Key results from usability benchmark study:

• NPS: 48 → 50

• "Easy to use": +34 point shift toward "very easy" (top rating jumped from 24% to 58%)

• "Easy to navigate": +39 point shift (top rating jumped from 36% to 75%)

• Task 1 (import customer list): +31 point gain, top rating 44% → 75%

• Task 2 (find getting-started video): +29 point gain, 56% → 75%

• Task 3 (find AI email-writing page): +31 point gain, 52% → 83%