Projects

Meebo Product Support

Location: http://www.meebo.com/support/

Created: March 2009

Supporting Technology: Django, Python, HTML, CSS

When I joined Meebo's creative team as Web Producer, it was laid out in my initial plan that redesigning our support pages would be my first big project. Previously, we had in place a wiki that served as our product support pages for the first three years of Meebo's existence. While it was able to serve its purpose in the early startup years - we had a lot of engaged users who helped to generate content in that space - we were finally in a place where it was not scaling to fit our growth and the amount of spam activity on the wiki was becoming unmanageable for the customer support staff.

I began work on this project by reviewing the structure of the content that was currently in place on the wiki, in order to be able to start creating a new information architecture that would work in a similar way. I also worked closely with customer support to find out what their biggest needs were as a department and what the needs of our users was likely to be. This feedback closely informed the design of the front page for support since we saw that searching support articles was likely to be the most common behavior and that there were a small handful of articles that made up a large portion of what most users needed, so those things had the most prominent positions on the front page. Additionally, the second iteration on the support pages includes an integration with HelpSpot, a ticketing system that was recently acquired to help support staff keep better track of communications with users.

As my first large scale project at Meebo, this was an incredibly valuable experience. I was able to take a design from conception to design iteration to development to implementation. I was challenged to learn the ins and outs of the Django framework to develop this system, while simultaneously taking on the role of a project manager to get input and occasional deliverables from the visual, server, and customer support teams as well as running weekly update meetings where I was responsible for reporting the progress made on the release of our system.

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