Case Study 02 // HelpNow+

Enterprise Support That People Could Trust

I led the end-to-end design of HelpNow+, a service management platform that replaced VMware's legacy IT service tool. I designed all three sides of it: where employees ask for help, where agents do the work, and where department admins define how their services run.

HelpNow+ employee home showing search, popular services, knowledge, and recent tickets — The employee home: search, services, and ticket status in one place.

role

Lead Designer

End-to-end product design, research, and alignment.

2022

team

Core Squad

3 Designers (including me), 12+ Developers, 4 Business Analysts, 1 PM.

outcome

$36M+ Saved

In the first year. ~40% fewer escalations and 94% positive experience.

The legacy tool was built for IT. HR, Finance, and Facilities were bolted on, each with its own process, and requests bounced between teams. Employees gave up and called or emailed instead.

ESCALATIONS

78 a day

On average.

AVOIDANCE

60%

Of non-IT users avoided the system entirely.

PROCESSES

Inconsistent

Across HR, Finance, IT, and Facilities.

Illustration of requests bouncing between IT, HR, and Workplace teams — Requests bounced between IT, HR, and Workplace, and employees kept calling to ask why.

Legacy ITSM portal before HelpNow+ — Before: built around IT, confusing for everyone else.

Service ecosystem across IT, HR, Finance, and Facilities — Service ecosystem

Employees only see the front door. Behind it, agents work the queue and admins define every service. A request that is confusing to submit is usually confusing to route and fulfill too. So I designed for all three sides together.

The scope was bigger than the team first realized. VMware had no product for service request management, and it was the missing piece in VMware's flagship offering. I ran alignment workshops to get the team onto the platform scope before we designed screens.

EMPLOYEES

Understand what's happening.

AGENTS

Understand what needs to happen.

ADMINS

Define how it happens.

Whiteboard covered in sticky notes from the scope alignment workshop — Aligning the team on the platform scope.

Actor map of the employee, agent, and admin connected through one service — Actor map: how employees, agents, and admins connect through one service

Framing the platform opportunity: user groups, journeys, and key features — Scope framing

Our first design stripped the home down to one search box, backed by NLP. It tested badly. People asked where the catalog was and whether the system was broken. You can't search for a service you don't know exists.

The final home shows the catalog and popular services for people browsing, and keeps search, pins, and recent tickets for people who know what they want.

Heuristic review of the legacy portal — Heuristic review

The search-first concept and what people said in testing — First try: search only. "Where's the catalog?"

Final HelpNow+ employee home — Final: a visible catalog, with search as the fast path.

The old tool had no privacy segmentation, so sensitive HR requests went by phone or email. And once a ticket was submitted, people couldn't tell what was happening, so they escalated.

In HelpNow+, tickets can be marked Private, backed by role-based permissions. Every ticket shows its stages, expected completion, and an Escalate action, so people know what's happening and have a next step besides calling.

Employee view of an onboarding ticket with progress stages and updates — The employee sees each stage, who's working on it, and when it will be done.

Employee ticket list with status — My Tickets

Role-based permissions for private tickets — Role-based permissions

Agents were working from a legacy ticketing tool that treated every ticket the same. But one request can hold several kinds of work, like new hardware, software, and an access badge, each with its own owner.

I designed an opinionated queue that sorts tasks by SLA risk: breached, at risk, and on track. Requests break into items and tasks, so each team works only its part. Team leads get a view of workload by agent to balance the load.

Multiple ticket types from text model to sketch to wireframe — Multiple ticket types

Agent task queue grouped by SLA status — The queue, grouped by SLA risk.

Agent view of an onboarding request split into tasks across HR, IT, and Facilities — One request, split into tasks for HR, IT, and Facilities.

Forcing every department into IT's process was why the old tool failed. Instead, I mapped each department's statuses to a shared set of stages. HR, IT, and Facilities keep their own language, and the platform still tracks every request the same way.

Admins also build their own services in four guided steps: details, intake form, workflow, and review. Employee onboarding, for example, runs 11 steps across HR, IT, and Facilities.