Support & Downloads

Summary

The merchandising team contacted the us about concerns prompted by a high percentage of calls to the help desk from users wanting equipment brochures and manuals sent to them.

Ricoh’s measures for reducing impacts on the global environment made these documents available online. Analytics reports and user testing revealed the search method that was too difficult to use.

We conducted a heuristic review of the old method to discover its pain points. We presented these findings to the Merchandising stakeholders and worked with them to determine the project goals and metrics for success. We then developed wireframes and small prototypes along the way to better explain how each piece of new page was working

In the weeks after launch, calls to the call center requesting manuals, brochures, and driver information were greatly reduced, and the number of manuals, brochures, and drivers downloaded increased.

Overview

Ricoh-USA is revolutionizing the modern office with their eco-friendly products and solutions. In an effort fo become more environmentally conscious, product brochures, manuals, and driver information is no longer printed and delivered with equipment.

Feedback from users via a simple pop up, and reports of high call volumes at Ricoh call centers regarding customers asking for copies of manuals, brochures, and driver information, revealed that Ricoh's customers were having trouble locating these types of artifacts for their equipment models.

We asked, "How can we help users locate brochures and manuals?"

Discovery

However, Ricoh-USA already had a feature that allowed users to search and download product assets.

Some in the company wanted to focus on driving users to the existing feature. However, after watching people interact with the feature during remote testing, it became clear that users could easily locate the existing search and download feature, but that they were uncomfortable and unsuccessful using it. when users responded that they were "having trouble locating" documentation, they actually meant that they were having trouble getting results from the current feature.

The question then became "How do we improve the document and driver search experience?"

This is how this...

became this.

Search field redesign

The original search bar at the top of the feature was revisited after testing revealed the following issues.

The original search bar was a bit intimidating for a number of reasons.

• The search bar was far longer than than it needed to be. While a long search bar seems like a good idea for a number of websites, this was not the case for our application. The product names and model numbers users needed to enter are much shorter. At a glance, users did not expect the entry field was supposed to contain something as short as their product model numbers.
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• Text was added to the search bar to help with this problem, Although this feature would return results for brochures and manuals, the text only mentions drivers, which discouraged users who were trying to find Brochures and Manuals. 
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• Text instructions were a bit lengthy, so customers didn't always read the instructions.
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The redesign opted for a shorter and more appropriate text entry field length. The search icon was made larger, and the text was more concise.

Instructional text

The secondary text portion contradicts the instruction text in the search field above. It now includes software and manuals along with the drivers mentioned in the search field above. The instructions were a bit wordy as well.

Instructional text redesign

The new instructional text is much less wordy because other cues on the page inform users of the type of downloads they can expect. The link to install drivers has been place elsewhere on the feature area.

Dropdown filter issues

Many users wanted the option of finding materials by filtering by categories. The following method was used. It presented several issues for users.

Dropdown Issue list

• Most categories had subcategories, however, many categories did not, which meant that when a user chose a category from the dropdown, they had to wait for the system to figure out whether or not to display a subcategory.  This was awkward as the change of format was often distracting to users who had had to figure out what had happened. Lengthy wait times bred frustration.
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• Users would choose a category and model, and be shown a Select Download dropdown menu, even when there were no downloads available for that piece of equipment. That meant that customers had to trigger a Go button only to receive the message that there were no download results.
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• Small, three word results messaging, when returned, was easily overlooked and users sometimes didn't notice that messaging had been displayed. 
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• Because the call to action was labelled Go, users expected to be taken to another page.
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• Users could not go back to any of the dropdown menus to begin a new search in a different category or subcategory. They had to select a Reset button and select all fields again, resulting in longer wait times if the user accidentally selects the wrong model.
  

• The Select Download dropdown also restricted users from gathering more than one asset at a time. If a user wanted a product's brochure, driver, and manual, they were required to go through the procedure three times, each time starting from the beginning using the Reset button.
  

View the Desktop Prototype  and  Mobile Prototype

Redesigned Support & Download feature



The combination of the new smaller search field, concise messaging, and a progressive reveal filtered search created a feature that was far more elegant, usable, concise and roughly half the size of the one it replaced. It also worked on mobile devices. The original feature did not work on mobile devices.