Designing a Centralized Tech Support Experience to Reduce Support Costs
Before the pandemic, Walmart Home Office associates received technical support in person. The shift to remote work forced associates, many who were non–tech-savvy, to rely on fragmented resources and limited expertise to troubleshoot device issues on their own.
As remote work became the norm, the Associate Digital Experience (ADE) organization identified an opportunity to decommission legacy tools, avoid rising support ticket costs, and improve associate satisfaction through MyTech—a centralized enterprise platform where global Walmart Home Office associates can monitor hardware and software, manage security, and resolve technical issues in one place.
COMPANY
INDUSTRY
Enterprise Software, Associate Experiences
Business Objective
Cost Avoidance
MY ROLE
As the UX Lead, I planned the scope of work, facilitated cross-functional communication, and contributed hands-on design support.
TIMEFRAME
14 weeks
TEAM
UX Research Team
2 UX/UI Designers
Cross-functional partners in Product, Business, and Engineering
THE CHALLENGE
For Walmart Home Office associates, support resources existed, but were fragmented, difficult to discover, and inconsistently structured. As a result, associates defaulted to opening support tickets for routine issues—driving unnecessary volume and cost for problems that could have been resolved through self-service.
THE SOLUTION
The MyTech Help Center centralized technical support into a single, structured entry point—prioritizing self-service, surfacing contextually relevant resources, and aligning with Walmart’s internal support workflows to reduce unnecessary ticket escalation.
Project Management Approach
Pulling from my experience as a UX consultant, I quickly created materials to get designers and cross-functional partners on the "same page." Due to the fast pace and number of stakeholders involved, outstanding questions, decisions, and due dates were getting lost in emails, group chats, and personal drives. By centralizing critical information and establishing communication cadences, team members spent less time looking for answers and more time focusing on research, design, and alignment.
UX Project Management Template
Supporting Associates
Quickly and Efficiently
The business and the user held unique, yet related, goals that we aimed to address through the project. Our business partners established the business goals, while associates voiced their pain points, needs, and goals through surveys and interviews with UX research.
UX Research:
User Experience and
Tech Support Expectations
The UX research team conducted generative research through an exploratory survey to understand user expectations for a tech support hub. The results showed that both Mac and PC users preferred a single place to access and engage with tech support.
Research Insights
Associates are least satisfied with the 2 most frequent tasks: finding self-help resources and submitting a ticket.
Associates access several websites for tech support: OneWalmart, ServiceNow, and Tech Bar, each with varying services.
Most associates are not "tech savvy" and need resources in plain language.
Associates expect to be able to submit a ticket and contact tech support from a central hub.
Associate Expectations
84%
submit a ticket
81%
chat with tech support
74%
video call tech support
74%
make an appointment with the Tech Bar
71%
find articles for tech issues
69%
find videos for tech issues
47%
chat with a bot
Kano Analysis: Across 163 respondents, both Mac and PC users expect a central location to access and engage with tech support.
Tech Bar Website Issues
The existing "Tech Bar" website aimed to support associates through FAQs, videos, and links to additional resources. However, the page was difficult to navigate and contained many redirects.
To consolidate tech resources, the "Tech Bar" website was scheduled to be decommissioned. My role was to conduct an audit to get an inventory of the website's resources and functionality.
Throughout the process, we discovered many UX issues with the existing website that contributed to the poor user experience.
The UX audit revealed several existing assets that were valuable, relevant, and still up-to-date. Rather than starting from scratch, we preserved and restructured these elements to maintain continuity while improving usability and clarity.
FAQs
Relevant articles
Up-to-date instructional videos
The decommissioned "Tech Bar" website relied heavily on tabs, technical jargon, and misplaced external resources.
Design Principles:
4 Levels of Help
The design was grounded in four (4) sequential levels of help, prioritizing in-context guidance and error prevention. By surfacing the right information at the right time and enabling self-service, users only escalated to expert help when it was truly needed.
Human-Centered Technology
Designed to Empower Users
L3: Expert Help
Expert help allows users to call, submit a ticket, or schedule an appointment at any time.
L2: Self Help
Self help allows users to learn and find answers at their own pace.
L1: Contextual Help
Contextual help catches issues within context of the page, prevents errors, and guides users to complete their tasks.
L0: Automatic Optimization
Future-facing: Leveraging AI and machine learning to build smart, integrated, relevant, and quick solutions for users.
The pathway from problem to solution levels up from automated, to discoverable, to reachable.
Five (5) key capabilities emerged, which considered user expectations, existing internal workflows, and common offerings for technical support.
Access to a "Help Center"
Find resources
Talk to an expert (in-person or virtually)
Submit a ticket / Track open tickets
Call by phone
Early concepts strategically prioritized self-service capabilities while deprioritizing support tickets and phone calls.
Design Concepts and Reviews
The existence of a Design System allowed us to move quickly from user flows to high-fidelity designs. I worked closely with another designer to mock up concepts, ensuring that we satisfied the use cases, upheld design system compliance, and implemented UX best practices.
In our weekly design reviews, we walked through the flows, aligning with Product and Business on internal workflows, while checking with Engineering on technical feasibility.
The Help Center is accessible from MyTech's primary navigation and consolidates all levels of support in one place.
Content hierarchy emphasizes contextually relevant self-help, while keeping expert support available as a fallback.
Users can connect with an expert in real time, virtually or in person.
The interface clearly presents both options, while ticket submission and phone support remain available as secondary paths.
Users can submit a ticket for asynchronous support.
Progressive disclosure and a progress indicator set expectations and reduce cognitive load, while ensuring tech teams receive the information needed to assess issues efficiently.
Concept Testing and Iteration
The UX research team conducted concept testing to validate early design assumptions, understand user expectations, and identify potential areas of confusion.
30-minute interviews conducted over Zoom
7 participants (6 PC users, 1 Mac user)
Understand how users expect to discover and interact with in-context tech support.
Evaluate whether users can intuitively navigate and use in-context support flows (ex: Help Panel).
Identify when users rely on self-service versus escalating to expert help.
✅ Design Validation
Strong, clear CTAs made actions obvious.
Associates opted for self-help, while valuing the availability of expert support throughout their experience.
🔍 Design Opportunities
Associates expected in-context help to surface a tooltip, not a help panel.
Many avoided links in the help panel, assuming the links would disrupt their current task.
Although “Ask Sam” exists in other Walmart tools, users did not perceive it as a chatbot.
Users expected the help icon to trigger a tooltip offering quick, inline guidance.
The help panel interaction conflicted with established UI conventions and seemed unfamiliar. Users assumed links would disrupt their current task, reducing engagement with the panel.
Additionally, the help panel increased overall project scope and was deferred as a potential future exploration and enhancement.
Users did not consistently recognize "Ask Sam" as a chatbot.
Despite its use in other Walmart tools, the feature lacked familiarity and was sometimes confused with Sam’s Club, reducing trust and engagement.
Handoff to Engineering
After finalizing the designs, I worked closely with another designer to prepare a detailed handoff for engineering. At the time, Figma Dev Mode was not available, so the handoff documented key user flows, design decisions, design-system components, spacing, and micro-interactions to support accurate implementation.
Organizing designs by use case helped engineers and stakeholders quickly understand user capabilities, trace end-to-end flows, and implement features with fewer gaps or assumptions.
Each component was labeled with direct links to design system documentation. Spacing and design decisions were annotated to communicate intentionality from individual pixels through end-to-end flows.
Driving Impact and Results
The "Help Center" in MyTech delivered measurable impact across cost savings, support ticket avoidance, and employee adoption. By centralizing and streamlining access to technical support, MyTech's "Help Center" quickly became the #1 self-service feature of the platform.
Cost Savings
Adoption
Lessons Learned
This project reinforced the importance of designing not just for users, but for the teams responsible for building and scaling the work. Key learning includes:
Strategically adapt to design system gaps. Some components, such as pagination, were not available in the internal design system. To prevent visual inconsistency, we audited existing Walmart patterns and designed custom components grounded in UX best practices.
Organize designs for engineering efficiency. Designs were organized across multiple Figma pages for handoff. Engineering feedback revealed a preference for responsive views displayed side-by-side, making it easier to understand how layouts adapt across breakpoints.
Separate design concepts from final designs. Storing design and handoff documentation in one file led to confusion during implementation. In future work, concepts were separated from finalized handoff files to ensure engineers always referenced the most current source of truth.
Simplify ways of working. As UX Lead, I introduced shared frameworks across drives, documents, and spreadsheets to centralize decisions, questions, and timelines. This reduced information loss across emails and private messages, minimized rework, and allowed the team to spend less time searching for answers and more time focused on meaningful delivery.
