Wayfair Help Center Redesign

Furniture delivery can be a confusing and stressful process, and where there is confusion there are also questions. Wayfair’s Help Center had the answers, but we were still getting hundreds of thousands of calls from customers who needed clarification. We had some theories as to why this was happening:

The Help Center was clunky to navigate, and the topic search bar rarely worked properly. Articles were static and dense, lacking hierarchy or visuals to guide the user towards an answer. Many articles were written by people whom no longer worked at Wayfair, and these abandoned articles had become progressively more stale and inaccurate. Our highest viewed article, Shipping Large Items, was also one of our least effective, with nearly 12% of users calling customer support within 1 hour of viewing the page. As a pilot test, I targeted this article for a rewrite and redesign, with the potential to prevent $965,000 worth of customer calls annually from this one article alone.

I conducted two competitor analyses: The first was a general gap analysis to better understand the formatting and navigation of help centers across industries. My biggest sources of inspiration were Article and Facebook, which both utilize a sticky tree menu to navigate topic buckets while loading articles on the right-hand side of the screen. This allows the Help Center to exist on a single page, simplifying the search process and reducing overall load times.

The second analysis specifically targeted the Delivery Process article, diving deeper into various e-commerce sites to understand how they explain their process to customers across various touchpoints (Help Center, email comms, chatbot, etc). Based on this research, I wrote a set of recommendations on how to effectively utilize each communication channel to provide the most value to customers when they reach out for support.

Prior to the Contentful migration, Wayfair technically had 8 independent Help Centers: Wayfair US, Wayfair Canada, Wayfair UK, Wayfair Germany, and four Specialty Retail Brands (AllModern, Birch Lane, Perigold, Joss & Main). To effectively manage merging all of these into a singular Help portal, I had to first audit the current-state for inconsistencies and redundant articles. I provided design and content recommendations for each article, and I restructured our core topic buckets and subtopics to fit within this new paradigm.

Utilizing all of my prior research, I organized a group of stakeholders from our North America and European teams to map out the end-to-end large parcel delivery journey. I wanted to understand which questions are most important to customers at each step, enabling Wayfair to proactively answer questions before a customer asks them through channels such as email and SMS. This workshop plus Google Analytics were used to order and organize the content in the new Delivery Process article.

I created a template for every new UI component within the Help Center, which we internally referred to as recipe cards. These recipes explain the anatomy of the component, how content is meant to reflow from desktop to mobile, design interaction notes, and specifications around font size and padding. The recipe simplifies my hand-off to developers, enabling them to build the component accurately with minimal design QA. The recipes also serve as a single source of truth if the component ever needs to be updated, or if a variant of the component is ever created.

With high-fidelity designs and new article content written, it was time to test the new Delivery Process article with customers. I provided each user with a set of questions that people typically call Wayfair to ask, their task was to search through the article for answers and explain Wayfair's policy in their own words. A control group was shown the original article, while the majority of participants were given a clickable prototype of the new article.  Users were timed as they looked for the answer to each question, and they were scored based on how accurate their explanation was to Wayfair’s actual policy.

This test proved that the new Delivery Process article was a success, with the test group finding answers 300% faster, and explaining Wayfair's policies with twice as much accuracy over the control.

Additional challenges came up when localizing this article for the UK and Germany. My counterpart on the European design team found that the most common questions customers ask were different from the ones we saw in North America. Europe had unique policies around COVID and Brexit-related restrictions, along with a few unique delivery methods that are not available in the US. I partnered with Wayfair's European legal team to edit the article, ensuring that I accurately represent Wayfair’s geo-specific policies.

For the German article, we required professional translation and localization to ensure that the page is clear and readable for native German speakers. I wrote Germany-specific policies alongside the legal team, then I handed off the article to our bilingual German content strategist to work his magic.

To increase awareness of the new Delivery Process article, I created contextual entry points across the site. Most customer calls occur within 48 hours of the delivery date, so I added a link to the article on the landing page (My Orders) which only appears during that time frame. On the Track Package page I link to the article directly below the estimated delivery date, prompting customers to skim the article before they call Wayfair. The Virtual Assistant was also given new logic pathways, so now if a customer asks a delivery process related question, the chatbot links the customer to the new article. In the future we plan to enable the virtual assistant to pull content directly out of the Help Center, so customers can have their question answered without having to read through an article at all.

After launch, we ran a 1-month A/B test to see how many customers contact Wayfair after reading the article. In North America we saw a 27% reduction in contacts, equal to $155,000 in savings per year. The UK and German articles, conversely, saw an increase in customer contacts. I organized an emergency stakeholder meeting to hypothesize why the article was performing worse in Europe. Theories ranged from the smaller sample size, EU-specific questions causing confusion, and some of the article links being broken/inaccurate. Overall, our biggest mistake was rushing out the European article without giving it the same level of due diligence and user testing that we did in North America. We took the European articles down temporarily, reworded the content with a UK content strategist, cleaned up the German translations, and scheduled sessions with UK and German users to get moderated feedback before we bring it back online.

The Delivery Process article and all entry points are fully launched for all North American customers, the UK and DE articles have been brought back online as well.