Background
Adobe hired Factor to conduct a complete overhaul of the Information Architecture of its Learn, Help, and Support content at Adobe.com. In the (thus far) four completed engagements Factor has conducted with Adobe Customer Success, Factor has focused on different aspects of Adobe’s enterprise content information infrastructure including Information Architecture, Content Strategy, Knowledge Management and Search. These engagements have been accompanied by five other engagements focusing on User Research, Persona Development and Customer Journey Modeling.
Challenge
Adobe approached Factor with a mandate to unify and streamline its Learn, Help, and Support content offering to promote customer understanding and drive customer success. Adobe faced myriad challenges with its ability to create, manage, maintain and govern Self-Service content, including lack of content, redundant content, content of ambiguous provenance, “orphan” or ownerless content, outdated content. In addition, the Self-Service team lacked control and influence over all of the stakeholders who were creating and publishing content. Our research and assessment showed the Self-Service team further lacked a coherent site architecture and navigation that would allow users to find the content they sought in their moments of need as they sought knowledge, assistance or troubleshooting.
Solution
In collaboration with the Adobe Self-Service team we established at a set of guiding principles that would drive project success. We sought to improve the customer’s relationship with Adobe by fostering inclusivity, channeling aspiration, and demonstrating clear value. We further sought to help the Adobe team complete the transition to a service-oriented mindset, which would require building the information infrastructure capable of supporting a service model. Finally, we sought to create a coherent conceptual framework that would be useful and rational to customers, and immediately recognizable to users of Adobe products.
Activities and Deliverables
The initial series of four engagements Factor conducted for Adobe involved the following activities and deliverables:
- User Research into Novice, Trialist, @Work, and Creative Professional behavior across scenarios and products.
- Assessment of analytics, content governance, taxonomy and metadata, competitors and user experience.
- Persona and Customer Journey modeling, culminating in a detailed Customer Journey Map across engagements.
- Development of Navigation, Content and Information Models.
- Detailed Site Architecture across properties and Page Description Diagrams for key content collections.
- Creation of Roadmap detailing the priority, sequence, level of effort, and steps required for future efforts.
- Capabilities and Results
Factor delivered a Roadmap of capability development for Adobe Self-Service based on a pathway of organizational readiness milestones. These milestones consist of capabilities Adobe must develop in order to meet its organizational mandate. Capability milestones include:
- End-user experience is fully defined and implementable
- Best practices are in place and strengthened by research
- Content strategy is defined and repeatable
- A governance plan is in place that allows for effective creation, prioritization, and management of content
- A content model is in place that allows content to be managed granularly, in order to flow coherently across contexts
- An information model that supports the desired user experience is in place
- Metadata is well-maintained and can adapt to changing needs over time
- SEO strategy is aligned with experience and business goals.
