About

Amazon’s IT Services team supports internal employee needs related to hardware, software, and networking. The “IT Portal”, offers self service solutions for common issues, that allows internal employees to resolve issues quickly without going through the process of a support representative. The portal’s content is regularly added as new tools and services or changes are rolled out for internal Amazon use. 

Task

The Writers and Communication specialists within the IT Service team don’t have regular access to UX Research. Since the content in the portal is used by thousands of users within Amazon, and oftentimes the content is not successful. Having content that isn’t successful results in a loss in productivity and increased support costs/efforts. The Writers and Communication specialists want to understand what makes content good versus bad, and how to better support Amazon employees. 

Phases / Methods

Phase 1: Explored it.amazon.com by doing a semi-structured interview in the beginning of the study to understand platform and user perception of the platform. Then moving onto a usability test, to understand how users use the help articles and test the elements/contents within the article.

Phase 2: Explored it.amazon.com revisions and updates from phase 1 findings. Four help articles were chosen for the study, two new consolidated help articles and two old help articles. Three articles were shown to participants a mix of new and old help articles, with display order counterbalance across participants. Participants were given a scenario and prompt to find the picked articles using the search engine.

Phase 3: Explored the It Knowledge base, looked at the other side of the question to understand how IT uses help articles to help Amazon employees. Study focused on US and APAC IT employees. Semi-Structured and exploratory study asking ITSE to identify good and bad articles within the knowledge base. Also asked how they use to knowledge base as a tool, and how they solve tickets as well as if there were any other tools they used.

Results

Results from the study helped improve help articles within it.amazon.com for them to continue to make changes and use findings to help UX writing. Knowledge Base study showed priority to redesign the tool, findings help rationalize leadership to allocate a new team to redesign the knowledge base.