CityInsight provides a suite of products designed to help municipal governments streamline their operations and improve communication with their customers. I previously assisted the team in the redesign of their client portal, where we optimized the account management and payment flows.

While the existing help desk system used by Customer Service Agents was functional, it wasn’t designed for the increased amount of support tickets and various teams that have been added to the system over time.

Platform: Web Role: UX Design

The existing admin portal, including the help desk portion, was no longer meeting the needs of users. Managers & Agents were struggling with:

No easy way to access insights and trends, such as the number of overdue tickets or the total workload of agents and teams

Difficulty assessing which tickets should be actioned first

Poor usability patterns that hindered productivity

Develop a full understanding of the daily workflow of managers and agents. Take this understanding, best practices, and our own creativity to radically transform the platform into one that anticipates the needs and priorities of users. Focus on key screens and workflows such as the Dashboard and triaging tickets, and deploy new patterns to unlock greater productivity and empower managers to make better decisions.

Working with the CityInsight team, we identified the core metrics and statuses admin users require to fully understand the health and performance of support requests and prioritized core actions into a powerful dashboard that leads managers and agents to take action on the most urgent requests.

We introduced simple trend line visualizations to core health and performance stats, allowing managers a quick snapshot of how the team is performing. Team-based stats were also added, allowing managers to distribute ticket assignments based on the current workload.

Ticket status counts are linked to filtered table views that allow agents to triage the most important tickets like overdue and urgent, as soon as they log in.

In the existing platform, agents were using the table view to open dozens of tickets into individual browser tabs and then would close each tab as they were actioned. This led users to sometimes lose track of a ticket in a sea of open tabs or close an urgent request by mistake.

In the re-imagined Requests screen, a new “Workflow” mode allows users to launch into a dedicated, focused view where they can triage a custom group of tickets without the need for multiple browser tabs. Users can simply hit ⌘W to launch into Workflow mode.

Users can also take bulk actions like changing statuses, updating agent assignments, sending messaging, and more. If needed, users can open multiple custom table views in new tabs dedicated to specific use cases, maximizing flexibility.

Working alongside the CityInsight team, I sweated over the precise hierarchy of information and which actions matter most to agents. We also prioritized the smooth navigation between tickets in the open workflow with clear pagination, controls, handy shortcut keys, and a list view so agents can jump to a specific ticket.

We discovered that many requests can be responded to with a few common replies. I designed a simple way for agents to open the saved responses menu and reply using shortcut keys, and even create their own.