By KarI Y. Snyder, MFA
As worlds largest blockchain application for all forms of media (video, text, images, and documents), Odysee is on a mission to allow all types of creatives a platform for free expression. The challenge for the growing company was in communicating help information and in providing more effective on-boarding in the sign-up process. I was brought on to lead an international remote team to clean up communications across the company, from branding to product design. This case study will focus on the consumer help experience.
- Head of Learning & Development & Lead Marketing
- Instructional Designer
- Project Manger
- Creative Director (all graphics)
- Lead Writer
- Bai Amorium (Portuguese)
- Chris Burton (French)
- Drew Hancok (English)
- Jasmin Kosubek (German)
- Immanuel Borggraefe (German)
- Socrates Azocar (Spanish)
- Dejan Brkic (3D Illustrator)
- 4 months
- Adobe Creative Suite (InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator)
- HTML & CSS
- React
- Docusaurus 2.0
- GitHub
- MailJet
The original Help Section of Odysee.com was a channel designed in a similar way to a YouTube channel. There was:
Most importantly, I found hundreds of questions from over a one year period on various posts that had not given a reply. A huge red flag for any incoming new user is that the company appears to not care about answering their questions.
I documented all the questions people asked on every Help post on a spread sheet within Monday. Next, I numerally counted which questions were most frequently asked so that I could see a pattern of specific information that was most pressing to the average user. I also developed a color coded system of topics so that I could see a percentage breakdown and best communicate this information to the team.
I tasked my international team to conduct a user study for their region or county so that we could better understand our top users and foresee trends for in-coming new users. I complied their information into a set of five personas: America/English, French, German, Brazil, and Spanish. Clear international user trends began to emerge as well as best communication tactics. The collective research findings allowed me to develop a user-centric problem statement:
Working with the team, I explored various documentation software choices. Our department budget was slim, we had a tight deadline, we needed something SEO friendly, and I needed to make sure that whatever tool was chosen could be easily used by non-tech users on the team so that there was no delay in Help Hub updates. I settled on Docusaurus 2.0. It provided the following important features:
The team could simply write docs and blog posts with MDX, which they all were familiar with, and Docusaurus would build the file.
The team could extend and customize the website layout by writing React components.
Localization could be done easily by the entire team and deployed as individual docs.
Most importantly for all users, the software made it easy for everyone to find what they need in the documentation.
I built out a sitemap based on prior research to best position the informational flow according to the questions that rated as top asked. The writing style was kept conversational and friendly with languages such as German using less formal tones. Design wise, the colors, icons and samples images were made consistent across all languages with English acting as the base language and global translations made off of it.
The company lacked a brand guide when I was brought in, so I developed one. In it I included a section dedicated to 3D characters that the company's illustrator had originally created. There was no back story to any of the characters used in the illustrations, thus I created backstories and personalities that matched some of the company staff and platform users. Ugly alien Lady Fungus became the lead customer service rep. This was met with laughter by quite a few users and since the Odysee brand has always embraced self-deprecating humor, it fit.
Users' search responses were collected to review how the redesigned Help Hub was performing and if we needed to change any cross references or reduce redundancy in certain sections. In particular, we found that there were some search errors with cross references between some of the languages. This was corrected.
Good documentation is both technically complex and simple to read and understand. I worked with my team to make sure there was visual clarity with simple written explanations on how to use the platform and app.
Randomly posted topics, lack of hierarchy, no cross-referencing or linking, and inconsistant visuals.
Written with short, clear inductive paragraphs, clear hierarchy, easy cross-referencing and linking, with insightful visuals.
