Designing self-service help and support sites is tough. It has the potential to save a business a lot of money, if done well. But most Help sites are so general that they don’t really fix the customer’s problem. When we started out to redesign Comcast’s Help site, we want to leverage the power of the users who were already using the help site and the users of our forums.

In our research we found that help sites were great for very general, common issues like finding out how to reset a password, but were not very helpful when a problem was more specific, like finding out what to do when your dvr would no longer record. Often very specific user problems were better handled by forums powered by other users.

In our designs we “bubbled up” the most viewed content as well as surfaced up the most active forum threads. We also made the site more aware of the services and history of the user seeking help. There was no need to show TV content if the customer only had Internet service, for example.

When we tested our concepts, we learned that users didn’t immediately gravitate to the Comcast help site. They first entered terms into Google. The first site they encountered that had the answer to their question was good enough. Surprisingly, Comcast’s own help pages weren’t ranking very highly in Google. So we immediately did an entire SEO overhaul of the site.