Views workflow enhancements

Modernizing the backbone of Zendesk

Overview

The Views feature in Zendesk is a ticket management tool that helps agents organize and prioritize support tickets. It allows teams to create customized lists of tickets based on specific criteria like ticket status, priority, customer type, or assigned agent. This project’s aim is to update this decades old feature to reduce our dependencies on 3rd party applications, improve agent efficiency, and set up our product for future improvements

My role

Lead product designer

Team

1 Accessibility engineer
1 Localization consultant
4 Frontend engineers
6 Backend engineers
2 Product managers
2 Design systems consultants
2 Admin experience consultants
1 Product designer (me)

Problems

What are views

- Where agents look for new work
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- Understand how work is prioritized relative to one another
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- A way for agents to know the specifics of what work they have to solve
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- A surface that every agent uses multiple times per day

Business case

While being the core product offering at Zendesk, the Views feature has seen little improvements over the past decade.  This has led to an unhealthy dependency on third party apps to provide core capabilities to Zendesk customers.  

Around 2,000 customers utilize 3rd party apps and pay more than $300m a year for these products.  They have routinely voiced Zendesk would be unusable with the features they provide

1,590 views
3,967
1,729

Customer painpoints

Each of Zendesk’s main user personas feels the need for improvements in this product space in their own way.

Admins

Admins create views to define their company’s workflow

Leads

LeadsTeam leads monitor views to manage theirteam’s workload

Agents

Agents use views they are assigned to to handle tickets

Admins

Cannot properly map their team structure to Zendesk workflows in Views due to limitations

Leads

Cannot manage or monitor their teams effectively without a structure of their Views

Agents

Spend too much time searching views to find tickets due to lack of easy cross View navigation,

Research

User interviews

Conducted multiple rounds of user interviews, both moderated and unmoderated to understand customer pain points, desired workflows, reasons for utilizing 3rd party apps, and feature prioritization.

Roles

8-10 admins

Segments

Small, mid level, and enterprise customers

Sample slides

Community Forums

Monitoring and collecting feedback based on community posts related to the Views feature or reviews of 3rd party apps on our market place

“Ordering views has been the single most frustrating admin task with Zendesk as our teams scale.”
“The limit of views to 12 (plus 8 personal) hinders efficiency… and implies a ceiling to how long we will be able to stay with Zendesk as our business grows.”
“When my admin reprioritizes the order of views, I have to relearn the position of my relevant views. Sometimes, the views that are important to me are all at the bottom.”

Insights

Customers expect more

The features provided by 3rd party apps customers expect to be supported natively and are upset they have to pay for these

Enterprise needs not met

Our largest customers have thousands of Views and no way to properly organize of see these

Neglect has been noticed

With the focus of AI and creating new capabilities to sell, our customers have noticed the neglect of our core feature sets

Competitive analysis

Insights

Categorization and view count

Most people are utilizing 3rd party apps to better organize their Views and surface more Views to their agents

Leverage existing syntax

In order to leverage third party apps, admins have to specially name these views.  This is a good foundation to build on to ease adoption of native features

3rd party limitations

Since these apps are not native they are limited in some ares like scalability and with their Admin Center capabilities.  This gives us room to not just duplicate their features but expand upon them.

Strategy

Crawl - Walk - Run

First we should aim to alleviate the top painpoints for our users then to start building the capabilities the 3rd party apps provide for our customers.  This work will give us the foundation to truly improve upon their and competitors capabilities looking ahead.

Phase 1 - crawl

Expand view count from a paltry 12 views to 100 views, alleviating about 30% of our customers’ need for 3rd party apps.

Phase 2 - walk

Provide the capabilities user’s expect of Zendesk out of the box.  Fully eliminating the need to any 3rd party enhancements.

Phase 3 - run

Use this foundation to improve more streamlined Views experience.  Provide admins and leads with better management tools, AI assistance, and more insights into how Views are used by their teams.

Design

Phase 1

Expanding view count is a top priority for our customers.  By allowing agents to see more views in their Views workspace, Admins and leads spend less time managing views to stay under the limit. .This increase will cause agents to spend more time looking for the right view so adding a quick search feature within this navigation will help curb this issue.

12 shared view limit
30 shared views - improved navigation

Phase 2

Providing a categorized navigation experience in both the Agent and Admin experiences will improve the lives of every level of agent.  
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Admins can now map view structures to their team hierarchies more accurately.
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Team Leads can utilize ticket counts at the category level to monitor burn down rate at a team level which wasn’t possible before.
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Agents can navigate views easier meaning less time wasted looking for where to do work and actually solving tickets for their customers.

100 categorized views
Searchable

Phase 3

This foundation allows and updating of Views components allows us to provide new enhancements that weren’t possible using outdated infrastructure.  At this phase we can really establish Views as the flagship workflow experience at Zendesk, by working with design systems we can build sharable components for the other workflow teams to utilize.

Categories via syntax
Tree grid structure

Future phases

Laying this foundation of Views improvements gives us the flexibility to make future enhancements to this product space.

Reorder by group

Allowing Admins to set specific view orders by team rather than across their entire organization.

Ticket preview

Give agents a way to quickly glean more details about a ticket from the views page.

View Copilot insights

Provide admins with the tools and data points they need to optimize their agents’ views experience.

Copilot suggestions

Surface copilot suggestions directly in the views page for approval by agents.

Challenges

Infrastructure limitations

As we scaled the amount of views available to users in the side panel, we hit multiple infrastructure road blocks which led to compromise.

Building accessibly

The existing views page is over a decade old so every piece of the feature we touched had to be built with new accessibility requirements.

Shifting teams

Over the course of the two year project, multiple cross functional partners came and went.  Our decision doc’s helped ease the transition of new team members.

Evangelization of new patterns

I didn’t want to only make this pattern for views, but also make it available for other teams as well.  6 other product spaces found our pattern satisfied needs in their roadmap.

Design system contribution

Working with design systems team every step of the way to ensure we built this in a way that could be ingested for wider use through out Zendesk..

Building towards a vision

How can we transform views into a cutting edge customer service suite while incrementally delivering features that improve customers' lives.

Customer validation

Every release so far has recieved resoundingly positive feedback both internally and externally.  Not only are these features improving the lives of each user persona we targeted but is also regaining the trust of our product team with our customers.

“I really like it - we can now get rid of the Lovely Views App for sure. Very sure many other ZD clients will like it this way. Finally an example again of Zendesk hearing the voice of their customers, and acting on it.”
“One of the teams using this has said this is the best enhancement that has been made to Zendesk in a long time and has helped them out tremendously!”
“This has been the most popular feature I have brought forward to my team this on Zendesk in a long time - they feel this is a major productivity win and helps so much with visibility for Team Leads.”

Success metrics

Phase 1

By simply expanding view count we were able to reduce the subscriptions of 3rd party applications by 10%

Phase 2

By providing native categorization of Views paid installs of the top 3rd party apps has decreased by 70%

Phase 3

Currently in progress so TBD!