Wayfair
Help & Contact
Transforming the Help Center into a one-stop support hub for all customers.
Overview
We transformed Wayfair's Help Center from a fragmented collection of service pages into a unified, personalized portal—a strategic redesign aimed at enhancing the customer experience while reducing support inquiries through contact deflection.
As the design lead, I defined the detailed vision for the new Help & Contact page and managed the work of a UX contractor who helped with validation testing, ensuring alignment with business goals and user needs throughout the entire process.
Timeline
Designed: Nov-Feb 2024
Launched: Aug 2024
My Role
Design Lead
Responsibilities
Evaluative research
Concept refinement
Interactive prototyping
Design deliverables
Concept validation
Team
2 Product Designers
1 Content Designer
1 Product Managers
2 Engineering Teams
Platform
Web
Discover
Background
The Help Center and Contact Us pages had inefficiencies and high bounce rates, driving millions of extra service contacts annually.
Previously, Wayfair’s "Contact Us" landing page offered multiple channels for live support, including chat, phone, text, and email. We ran an A/B test where we replaced these options with the Virtual Assistant in order to reduce costs by deflecting live contacts and encourage self-service.
The Problem
The Help Center and Contact Us pages had several UX gaps that led to inefficiencies and user frustration. Two major issues:
🚦 The Help Center is the biggest source of traffic to the Contact Us page.
🚪 Many customers would immediately bounce if they only see the Virtual Assistant as the only option.
Research
2M
Annual contacts come from visiting the Help Center
45%
Users visit Contact Us after the Help Center
16%
Abandonment rate on Contact Us
We leveraged our A/B testing insights, FullStory session observations, and conducted a comparative analysis to uncover key gaps in Wayfair’s experience.
Learnings
🔀 Customers frequently toggle between Help Center and Contact Us due to redundant content.
🏡 Customers need for a softer, more welcoming entry point that accommodates diverse user preferences
🧘🏻♀️ Competitors offered simple, single-page help experiences with a consistent design pattern.
Define
Opportunity
How might we simplify the Help Center to streamline and encourage self-service pathways?
Concepts
Crafting this solution alone would be like trying to build a house with one brick 🧱— this project required close collaboration with various teams.
We partnered with Order Experience to map out delivery statuses and self-service options, while Storefront provided insights on effective design patterns they recently implemented on the app experience for surfacing relevant order information.
Design Goal
Enhance the customer's journey to seeking help by providing a personalized and centralized experience that allows them to self-serve, with Wayfair stepping in as needed.
Develop
Concept Validation
Usability Testing
We held two rounds of unmoderated usability testing. This was our opportunity to validate any concerns with the overall concept and potential usability concerns, like the design affordance in the Help Articles section.
We synthesized our findings using both qualitative and quantitative data to give teams and leadership a clearer understanding of design impact. By combining both data types, we can offer a well-rounded perspective that informs strategic decisions. To quantify and benchmark usability insights, we used the SUPR-Q questionnaire, providing measurable data to support our findings.
Usability Scorecard
4.19
Raw Score
Component Scores
4.40
Usability
4.80
Trust & Credibility
4.30
Appearance
4.37
Loyalty
Deliver
Solution
We streamlined the Help Center by consolidating resources into a unified, easy-to-navigate landing page.
By simplifying navigation, improving content hierarchy, and promoting self-service, we aimed to enhance customer engagement and satisfaction.
Our content designer did a major sweep of our articles, merging some where necessary and cleaning up the hierarchy.
Approach
👤 Add personalization with context-aware greetings and tailored actions
🗺️ Simplify navigation by providing direct access to orders, quick actions, and help topics
🏢 Consolidate touch points into a single, comprehensive place for customers to get help
🤖Empower customers with intuitive, self-serve solutions
Consolidated Help Resources
Deprecated the Contact Us page so we can better direct customers towards our self-service options and Virtual Assistant first.
Personalized Greeting & Recent Orders
Greet customers when they're logged into their Wayfair account.
Improves relevance by surfacing user-specific details upfront, namely their three most recent purchases.
Provide delivery status and a drawer filled with a list of dynamic actions the customer can take for that particular item.
Dynamic Quick Actions
Streamlines navigation by presenting contextually relevant actions.
Gives customers a clear idea of what sort of actions they can take online without contacting live help.
Customers are presented with ineligibility messaging for actions, when applicable.
Tabbed Help Topics
Organizes content into intuitive categories with preview cards, reducing cognitive load.
Each category tab has a slider full of articles. Articles have a preview sentence to give customers an idea of what information they'll find inside. The articles open on a new tab.
View All opens a drawer that lets customers see all articles listed out, in case scrolling through tabs and a carousel doesn't fit their navigation expectations.
Feedback Mechanism
Encourages trust and continuous improvement by enabling users to provide feedback on the Help & Contact hub.
Further Help Section
Container that lives above the footer.
It will sit directly on top of the footer so that it feels like a part of it. Adding a value prop and CTA for Virtual Assistant, which informs customers that the VA can connect them with Live Help if needed
Design Deliverables
Impact
$
XXX
k
Contact Cost Reduction (NDA)
150k
Contacts (annualized)
6.4%
Follow-on Contact Rate
These Phase I designs launched over the summer, we hit our global annual savings goal due to contact deflection 🎉
Want to learn more?
Curious about my research insights, process, and next steps? Let’s chat—I’d love to walk you through the full case study!