Help Hub
Consolidating fragmented support into a personalised, contextual Help Hub in-app, reducing CS dispute escalations
Brand
Depop
Product
App
Key Highlights
Stakeholders Interviews, UX Research, North Star, User Mapping, IA, A/B testing, Content Design support, Marketing support
Reach
45 million users
Core Collaborators
Context
The in-app customer experience support, previously anchored by the outdated Dispute Resolution Centre (DRC), suffered from critical structural and usability deficits. The underlying infrastructure was highly fragmented; users encountered confusing, duplicated entry points across the application, which often forced them away from the native environment and onto disconnected channels like email to initiate dispute resolution. This practice of raising disputes via email was perceived as a commitment by users and incurred unnecessary operational costs.
Compounding this fragmentation, the existing iOS Help Centre was too hidden, generic, and critically lacked context-awareness and personalisation. This failure to provide relevant, proactive assistance based on the user's journey led directly to low engagement and missed opportunities for self-service. Fundamentally, the design was uninspiring and failed to enhance trust or clarity, especially for new users. The primary goal of the redesign was thus to transform this scattered, non-contextual system into a cohesive Help Hub, ensuring support is easily accessible, personalised, and encourages users to efficiently manage their support needs entirely within the app.
Goal
Therefore, the primary goal became transforming this generic, fragmented experience into one cohesive, context-aware Help Hub that promotes trust and enables users to easily manage their support needs through self-service.
Action & build
Starting with interviewing Customer Service (CS) Agents, breaking down the CTR across all entry points for help and dispute. A fundamental disconnect was uncovered: users often lacked a basic understanding of platform rules, leading to easily avoidable issues like account bans. This insight reframed the entire approach, shifting the focus of the Help Hub from merely a dispute centre to a vital educational area. The goal transformed into empowering users to learn and navigate Depop successfully.
This new vision culminated in a North Star concept, designed in collaboration with Marketing, Content Design, and Brand teams, which proposed bringing curated social media content and prioritised short-form video directly into the hub.
However, the reality of technical debt demanded a pragmatic approach. The Help Hub was an in-app feature, yet the essential Help Centre articles were hosted on an entirely separate system (Zendesk). The immediate problem was clear: the system was forcing users into a jarring, fragmented mobile web experience just to read important guidance. To combat this friction, the initial deployment (V1) focused on localisation and hard-coded high-priority articles to stay within the in-app experience. Working closely with Content Design and Engineering this tactical move immediately mitigated the need to push users out, keeping the support journey cohesive, building user confidence, and fostering self-service within the trusted environment of the Depop app.
With existing UX research indicating that the multiple entry points to finding help and managing disputes, made it confusing for users to know where to go. Running a A/B test was prioritised. This test specifically measured the effectiveness of the new 'Help Hub' naming convention and its singular, unified entry point, ensuring the fundamental access mechanism was crystal clear to every user.
To deliver this clarity, every component had to be meticulously designed. Countless work-in-progress (WIP) sessions were spent refining the visual language and behaviour of the multiple components. The design exploration deliberately favoured an immersive feel—for example, incorporating large images within the 'previous orders' component. These patterns were not just aesthetic changes; they were contributions to the overarching Thrift Design System, and their true purpose was functional: to gently steer users towards resolving issues within the Help Hub, rather than resorting to an external email. With the new Information Architecture (IA) tailored for the four user types, the sheer number of required screens dramatically reduced, creating a frictionless path that encouraged self-service and swift resolution. We shifted from Resolution Centre to Educational Hub.
Impact
Currently in build and I am doing QA with the engineers ...watch this space 👀