The Avanade support portal is outdated and ineffective, failing to meet the needs of users and support providers alike.
Users struggle to navigate the poorly categorized content rendering the portal's self-service features underutilized. As a result, users default to calling support directly, increasing the workload for support teams and creating inefficiencies.
This gap not only impacts user satisfaction but also strains resources, highlighting an urgent need to reimagine the portal into a modern, user-centric platform that empowers users to find answers independently while alleviating pressure on support staff.
"People usually default to calling someone... not self-service" - Project Stakeholder
Stakeholder hypothesis
By refreshing the look and feel of the site, we will be better able to encourage self-service
1. What does our client describe as self-service?
2. Does that align with what users consider self service?
A user flow analysis allowed us to understand how users are navigating through the site. We looked at the past 6 months of data to understand how and when users navigate content housed in the support portal.
Fig. 1: A flow breakdown of all user paths in the Avanade Support Portal in a six month period
Employees aren’t always finding what they’re looking for on their first or even their second try. This implies either:
A. Unclear results in search or incomplete
B. Unrelated content in their articles
Additional user research was also conducted to understand the following:
1. What are user’s behaviors and motivations when they need support - this will help us to understand how to best position the support portal to be a support resource that matches employee expectations.
2. What do they consider as self-service - this will allow us to understand how to best structure support content and features to match the consensus employee expectations, designing for the general, not the edge cases.
Over a one month period, our team conducted surveys gaining 100+ responses, held over 50 one-on-one interviews with both support users and providers.
User research key takeaways
Maze without a map
Without Intuitive wayfinding, users struggled to locate resources that were correct and accurate, which reduced their confidence in the system’s ability to meet their needs.
Information dumping ground
Over time, Avanade’s lack of self governance for intranet support resources caused an accumulation of outdated and incomplete content that negatively impacts usability.
Tragedy of the commons
Support providers were neither able to allocate their time efficiently, nor appropriately when the preferred method of problem resolution for users was to contact them directly.
"I tried going through the appropriate process, but... I still had to call someone" - User
We identified that updates to the site’s information architecture and content strategy is the biggest and most impactful update we can make to enhance the experience of Avanade employees.
Audit of all Avanade's support content repository
There are 427 child categories in Avanade's support taxonomy. Those categories house thousands of unique content and articles. We documented all of those categories individually to understand where content is placed.
Validate the usability of the old taxonomy
We set up treejack tests how well users can navigate the taxonomy by giving them support tasks. It was very clear from the test that the taxonomy is both out of date and do not align with user expectations.
Fig 2. Treejack testing results for support tasks navigating the old Avanade support taxonomy.
Reorganize the content
All 427 child categories were reorganized into three main parent categories: HR, IT, and Security.
The process involved identifying trends and relationship as well as the removal of very edge case categories. Open card sorts were conducted with over fifty users to determine how users group and name content. A second round of hybrid card sorting was completed to understand whether the new groupings meet expectations and whether they perceive any gaps.
Fig 3. Reorganizing all 427 child categories into the three main parent categories - Green=IT, Yellow=HR, Grey=Security - Content scrubbed
Validation of new taxonomy through another round of treejack testing
A second round of treejack tests with the same tasks was completed with a different set of users. We saw significantly higher success rates for the tasks.
Fig 4. Results from the second round of treejack testing.
The implementation of the new taxonomy is integral in the Support portal refresh. New designs that focused on the Avanade brand and accessibility were handed off to the developers.
Fig 5. The homepage of the new Avanade Support Portal
Design Highlights
Focus on the three main categories
The new site has three main parent categories. These categories were determined by user feedback and validation.
Virtual tour functionality
A virtual tour was established to onboard Avanade employees to the new taxonomy
Improved SEO for support articles
The search bar functionality has been improved to enable users to better search the Avanade support repository.
The new Avanade support portal 2.0 was released shortly after design handoff. Initial data shows that the refresh was a success as support articles are getting higher traffic than previously. I've since rolled off the project, but all indications are that users are having more success finding content that they need.
Knowledge Base Article Structure and Governance
As phase 2.1 of the project, I believe that the best area to upgrade is the knowledge base article structure and governance. I believe that updating content to be more readable, usable and relevant will improve the support experience of Avanade employees even further.
Leveraging new LLMs and AI
There is a lot of opportunity to incorporate AI into the next evolution of the support portal at Avanade. I believe the following would be great use cases for these new technologies:
- Conversational support
- Knowledge base integration
- Personalized recommendations
- Content generation with multilingual support
- Sentiment analysis and feedback processing
- Virtual assistant and triage
This project operated in a fast timeline. There were a lot of busy days, but in summary, I learned how to deliver under pressure
New methods of validation
Throughout this research project, I was exposed to multiple levels of research methodologies. Objectives are really important in determining what research method to use.
Establishing an organic user pool
One of the most difficult parts of this project was recruiting users. We did not have a pool of users to select from so we had to organically build our pool of users. Through numerous company posts and email requests, we were able to establish a pool of over 200 users! Users that we use for other projects.
Project Management
I had plenty of opportunities to play the project manager role throughout this project. Without an official project manager, I was pushed out of my comfort zone in setting up calls with stakeholders and making sure that designers and developers are on the same page regarding the redesign.
© 2025 Michael Tan. All rights reserved.
