Guidewire
A customer support community to foster knowledge sharing and collaboration.
The Challenge
The Guidewire customer community was being used primarily for submitting and managing support cases but not much else. While many community users were certified on the company’s platform and had plenty of knowledge and expertise to share, they felt the community did not provide enough of a forum to facilitate this type of peer-to-peer discussion. Guidewire needed to encourage users to join discussions, ask questions, share their knowledge and work together to solve common issues. The community also needed to embody a new brand identify that Guidewire had just launched.
My Role
I participated in initial user research / strategy and was responsible for the redesign of the community from information architecture through to prototyping and branding.
Team
A project manager, a technical architect, 3 developers, a business analyst, a business architect, a quality engineer and me.
Length
3 months
Client
Guidewire is a publicly traded software company with a large and complex cloud platform that provides services to insurance carriers worldwide.
Approach
As this project came with an aggressive timeline to launch at one of Guidewire’s upcoming events, our team had to maintain clear swim lanes and lines of communication. The Business Architect handled much of the vision and alignment activities including creating a success charter. I worked closely with the Business Architect and Business Analyst on a brief research and discovery phase during which we conducted limited interviews. This was followed by the capabilities stage during which we mapped user needs against features of Salesforce Experience Cloud, the platform that we would leverage to build the online community. The bulk of my contribution to the project came during the solutioning stage when I created wireframe prototypes, tested with select end users and produced a build-ready hifi prototype and UI kit.
An outline of the approach our team took to this project. The stages highlighted in blue are the ones in which I played a primary role.
Jobs to be Done
We leveraged the Jobs to be Done framework to document and align on user goals, challenges and needs. Through workshops and interviews, we produced several virtual whiteboards which outlined high level goals, jobs to be done and proposed features or content which related to a particular set of jobs.
The results of a workshop session with project stakeholders in which we listed and prioritized jobs to be done from high level goals.
Future State Site Map
I created this sitemap in order to visualize the breadth of the solution and align with both the client and development team on what pages would need to be designed and built. The sitemap also provided alignment on what components and pages would be a fully custom build versus dependent on features native to Salesforce Experience Cloud. This was important to determine level of effort and ensure the project work remained in scope.
A detailed sitemap of the proposed community.
Wireframes
I produced a set of wireframes for key screens and linked them together into a working prototype. This allowed us to test our proposed solution with actual end users of the existing community. The testing sessions revealed a few key points of confusion that had to be addressed before the final build ready assets were produced.
Homepage
Topic detail page
Product releases
Groups page
Knowledge landing page
Article detail page
Hifi Prototype
After testing and refining the wireframes, I produced a high fidelity prototype. This allowed stakeholders to visualize the product and provide final feedback before we began building out the solution. The prototype, along with an extensive UI Kit (see below) also served as the blueprint for the development team to begin building the solution.
Home page
Topic detail page
Case list
Self registration
Groups page
Knowledge landing page
Articles detail page
Coveo search results
SLDS & UI Kit
Given that we were layering Guidwire’s brand over a combination of pre-built and custom components, ensuring consistency was a challenge. The UI Kit covered all aspects of the community and clearly demonstrated how the development team was to build custom components as well as override styling of standard components in the Salesforce Lightning Design System (SLDS) to ensure consistency with the Guidewire brand.
UI Kit colours
Component blueprint for the primary navigation
Component blueprints for custom links
UI Kit fonts
Component blueprint for the component box
Component blueprint outlining SLDS overrides
Outcomes
Guidewire’s redesigned customer community has been built and launched in summer ‘21 as part of their wider customer journey launch program. The project stakeholders have been very pleased with the results and are looking forward to replacing their existing community with this more collaborative and branded solution.