Transforming Service Management for Enterprises
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Summary
What is HelpNow+?
A VMware internal service platform that enables employees to request help across HR, Finance, Logistics, IT and other departments.
The Project
Rebuild trust and boost efficiency by streamlining how services are discovered, requested, tracked, and fulfilled across the company.
Team: 3 Designers • 12 Engineers • 3 PMs • 1 Product Owner
Timeline: 6 Quarters
My Role
As the Lead Product Designer, I drove UX strategy, research, and design execution - leading workshops, co-sketching with stakeholders, testing with users, and guiding delivery across two major platform releases.
Success Metrics
- Reduction of phone service cost by 75%
- Increase fulfillment productivity by 2x
- Reach 90%+ user satisfaction
Impact
- Fulfillment productivity and mobile adoption increase 35%
- $5M+ cost savings through reduced phone services and licensing costs
- ~95% user satisfaction & average ticket filing time under 1 minute
CONTEXT
In a workplace known for happiness, the support experience wasn’t part of the joy.
Company of 40,000+ employees. Award-winning culture. Nestled in 100 acres of nature.
Yet, every time someone needed HR help, or requested office supplies, they dreaded the help desk portal, and instead just picked up the phone!
PROBLEM
Unhappy Employees, and a costly affair
- $5M+ lost annually in phone support and licensing costs
- Employees frustrated
- Departments blamed
- Internal reputation damaged
BRIEF
The leadership team gave us a bold challenge:
“Make internal support as delightful as everything else here.”
Discovery
USER RESEARCH
I listened, shadowed, and learned from 3 key user groups:
Employees
Task: Request for support or service at work.
Privacy Risks: Employees hesitated to log sensitive issues (like HR complaints) due to lack of confidentiality.
“I just can’t trust the system when I really need help!”
Fulfillers
Task: Support Employees by resolving issues.
Lack of Accountability: Tickets were often rerouted multiple times, leading to confusion and delays.
“This $#@&%# system makes it all so overwhelming!”
Admins
Task: Define what services are supported and how.
IT as a Bottleneck: Every change in a service workflow or SLA had to go through IT department.
“Why do we need IT for every single change?!?”
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Spotting a Market Gap
I found most tools were built as ITSM (IT Service Management) systems - later retrofitted for HR, Finance, and other departments. This force-fit approach led to fragmented experiences and low adoption across non-IT teams.
💡 We had a strategic opportunity to design a system that serves every department - ESM (Enterprise Service Management) systems - a need the market was just beginning to recognize.
STAKEHOLDER ALIGNMENT
Building a Shared Understanding
I ran Experience Canvas and Starbursting sessions to map problems across departments and align on desired outcomes.
Key Findings:
- ITSM tools were too dependent on IT, preventing self-sufficiency.
- HR & Finance teams struggled with inefficiencies and privacy concerns.
- Manual workflows caused frustration and delays.
Solving for Employees: Ease of Use
RATIONALE
Heuristic Evaluation (based on Jakob Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics) showed multiple issues with Navigation Overload, Terminology Clarity and Visual Hierarchy. 1-1 interviews (n=6) revealed:
- Power users used the incident form, meant for IT, creating a an extra hop in resolution. (and also hurting the front line agents)
- Casual users spent over 2 minutes to find the right ‘form’ to request for a service!
DESIGN
My team explored ways to simplify and streamline the end user experience, while engineering did a proof of concept (POC) on elastic search using NLP. With this power, we experimented with:
✅ Radically simplification
✅ Powerful elastic search
✅ NLP Service Tagging
USABILITY TESTING
Failing Early: We clearly failed to meet the users where they were!
ITERATION 2
Pivot: We restored the familiar service catalog, but added smart shortcuts to departments.
Solving for Employees: Rebuilding Trust
RATIONALE
We had learned from users:
- Information changed hands, so they avoided using the system for sensitive issues (mainly HR and Finance)
- Tickets changed status mysteriously!
DESIGN
From brainstorming ideas with the team, we came up two solutions:
✅ Private tickets that routed securely
✅ A unified status model:
- Internal teams used custom statuses
- Users saw simple stages like Received → In Progress → Resolved
Efficiency for Fulfillers
Flocks of the same feather
Fulfillers struggled with jobs that comprised of multiple, dependent, or sub tasks (think onboarding a new employee or procurement). They had to manually search each ticket to make sense of the progress of the job. We started by simplifying that view.
Form a meaningful view
And then I crafted a cohesive UI that brought all related tickets together, improving efficiency by 3x. This prompted the team to ideate a new ‘ticket-item’ object model to technically design a framework that scaled across departments and allowed solving for dependencies.
"Now I can see everything in one place. No hunting." - Field Fulfillment Agent
Autonomy+Efficiency for Admins
400+ forms. Hard-coded. IT-dependent.
Departments had 400+ service forms to manage. I ran workshops with the admins to brainstorm ways to reduce maintenance - eventually coming up with a re-architecture that made it scalable and future proof.
I ran co-design workshops with Admins → Mapped overlap → Built modular form templates
✅ 5 working sessions ✅ 4 Admin Users ✅ Reduced 400+ forms to <100 services
Admins now easily managed their services, without IT help.
RESULTS
Product
Impact
What This Taught Me
True transformation happens when you design with the people, not just for them.
Our users were co-creators, not just ‘requirement sources’. We ended up uncovering root causes - and the solutions were more meaningful and sustainable.
One of my best journeys of discovery, iteration, and collaboration. This project showed me the power of user-centered design in solving complex organizational challenges. - Me!
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