I designed a Helpdesk product during my time as design director at Capacity.

Helpdesk is a core part of the Capacity platform because support issues that cannot be resolved with automation must be escalated to a [human] agent. We spent a lot of effort building personas around the helpdesk agents so we could understand their needs.

This wasn't a time-boxed project with a clear end date. Rather, this was work that evolved over time as we released an MVP to the market, observed how customers used it, and adjusted and iterated over time. The following shows, not all, but many of the features we designed and shipped to the delight of our customers.

Helpdesk agents can add new Q&A to a knowledge base without leaving the helpdesk. The inquiry and response cards are the same component used in the knowledge base.

Helpdesk Message Composer UI - This part of the UI is a great example of when you need to pack a ton of important functionality in a relatively small space—all while making it look clean and enjoyable to use.

Voice of Customer and competitor analysis made it clear that we were going to need to support public and private messages. There were concerns about mixing public and private messages in the same space because it may be hard to orient yourself in the conversation. I opted to use the tab component to bifurcate the experience at the highest level. User testing confirmed that this decision cut down on cognitive load because users can trust that everything in one area is public, and everything in another area is all private.

@mentions - Search and tag users in helpdesk comments so that the recipient can be notified.

Live Editing - Some user pain we uncovered was that there was no visibility into what agent(s) were working on a specific ticket. This often led to agents unknowingly editing a ticket at the same time, and that experience was confusing and frustrating if their work was undone or not saved.

I designed options for how we might show user attribution during live editing of fields and situations where someone is actively typing in the message composer.

Reorder and Rename Custom Views

As we interviewed helpdesk support agents we kept hearing a similar theme. In addition to the default filtered ticket views provided, agents wanted to create their own custom filtered views and be able to save the views.

Not having to reconfigure special views several times a day gave a lot of time back to support agents.

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