Transforming the Hootsuite Help Center
OPPORTUNITY
The Hootsuite Help Center was a critical part of the customer experience, serving a platform with more than 18 million customers. Its content also extended beyond the website, reaching customers through support workflows, conversational tools, and in-product experiences.
The existing Zendesk-based model had worked well when a small number of support advocates were creating content. As Hootsuite grew, the organization needed a more mature approach that could support a larger team, improve the customer experience, increase content reuse, and create a foundation for automation and multi-channel publishing.
ROLE
I led the evolution of the Help Center experience and its supporting content infrastructure. My work spanned:
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Customer and internal-user research
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Experience and navigation improvements
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Content-management requirements
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Vendor evaluation and proof-of-concept work
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Content-model and publishing strategy
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Migration planning
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Accessibility, localization, and measurement
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Coordination across content, support, marketing, IT, and external vendors
The work required balancing immediate experience improvements with the design of a longer-term content platform.
APPROACH
We combined customer and support-team research with phased improvements to the existing Help Center while planning a more scalable future platform. The work included a UX refresh, accessibility and navigation updates, CMS requirements, vendor evaluation, content-model planning, and the design of a connected publishing architecture using MadCap Flare, GitHub, Zendesk, search, analytics, and localization tools.
RESULTS
The Help Center evolved from a platform-bound publishing experience into a more flexible content ecosystem. Customers gained improved navigation, readability, accessibility, and support pathways, while the content team gained stronger authoring, version control, localization, analytics, and publishing capabilities.
LESSONS LEARNED
This work reinforced that a Help Center is not simply a collection of articles. It is a connected customer experience shaped by content, technology, search, accessibility, localization, analytics, and support workflows. It also showed the value of improving the current experience while designing for the future.