Business tooling

Teamwork Desk
My role
User research - user interviews, community feedback analysis, observed behaviour sessions.

Data analysis -  Analytical observations and controlled experiments tests post release.

Hypothesis setting, benchmarking, user story mapping, strategy analysis, concept prototyping, UI visual execution, design system contributions, user-testing (pre-release), experiment analysis and iterations.

July 2022 — Jan 2023
Project Overview
Teamwork Desk is a help desk and ticketing system designed to easily manage customer emails in one location. Essential to the functionality of Desk is the ability to create, manage and report on tickets through which interaction with the customer and agent is formed.
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With the objective of gorwing existing user base, research showed that users sought the ability to use business tooling for project management purposes directly within Teamwork Desk. This would allow businesses to bridge the gap between customer service provision and project managment.
Problem statement - A lack of business tooling
The core functionality of Desk is that of being a help desk to provide customer support. Consumers will send emails into a support team, who, in-turn, will respond and solve queries.

Essentially, this flow does not allow the ability for agents to manage tickets directly from the initial email - Desk lacked any form of buisiness tooling or project management scheduling.

Research showed the lack of fuctiuonality was the reason for a plateau in seat growth.
Research and hypothesis setting
Design problems within the ticket page of Desk were discovered through  research (user interviews, community feedback analysis and observed behaviour sessions).

In terms of metrics, specific stats allowed us to set design hypothesis.

Data showed that 79% of existing users wanted to assign a task to a colleague (to action) when dealing with a customer complaint email.

Research also showed that approximately 31% of complaint emails required tasks to become recurring project management events.

27% of support issues required billing fucntionality - the product lacked any time logging functionality.
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Allowing dependant tasks will solve issues quicker
Linking one actionable task to another will allow businesses to solve more complex probelms and create more tickets - reuslting in more seats needed.
Project managment tooling will ingrain Desk
Adding  project management tooling will allow support tickets to be actioned soley by Desk and increase reliance on Desk as a business solution
A Quick-add feature will increase efficiency
A functionality that alllows multiple project managament tasks to be created quickly for one customer email will improve ticket repsonse time and efficiency.
Assigning reminders will remove 3rd party tooling
There is no option available for users working within Desk to set reminders to action tasks amongst teammates. Allowing this will allow more businesses to solve tickets more efficiently
Design hypothesis
Reminder functionality will remove 3rd party tooling
Solution
By assigning task reminders to fellow agents, it will remove the need for businesses to need 3rd party tooling for scheduling and drastically improve response efficieny.

Support teams will be more coherent the the need for more seat subscribtions will grow.

Controlled A/B testing showed a toast card (as opposed to a linear path) to be more effective in a reminders per task scenario (as flow wasn't broken / postion lost)
Solution #1
Design hypothesis
Creating dependant tasks will ingrain Desk
User scenario
Linking one actionable task to another will allow businesses to solve more complex probelms and create more tickets - reuslting in more seats needed.

Agents can now cross-link project management tickets and strengthen the dependance on Desk as the core tooling app in their process

Controlled testing showed a modal (desktop) to be more effective in finding specific dependancies than from within a side panel. The additional space/navigation level resulted in a better experience and a higher dependancy per task conversion.
Solution #2
Design hypothesis
Quick-add multiple tasks will increase efficiency
User scenario
A functionality that alllows multiple project managament tasks to be created quickly for one customer email will improve ticket repsonse time and efficiency.

Agents can now quickly create multiple tasks directly from the email page of Desk.

More created tickets results in a higher usage rate and an improved ticket satisfaction/completion rating.

Controlled testing showed that a quick add (return) fucntionality resulted in more created tasks per ticket than that of a button based approach that launched a modal (and required additional mouse clicks)
Solution #3
Impact against hypothesis
Desk subscriber counts grew consistently for 3 years as of 2023. Revenue has also risen from 80k pm in 2018 to £500k pm in 2023 as part of the design uplift.
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Feedback via surveys and the core user community suggested a vastly improved experience for agents and a higher ticket completion rating due to the additional tooling.

Productivity within support teams increased and as a result, a visible uplift in Desk subscription numbers.
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✅ Adding dependant tasks created intergration
Fucntionality that allowed linking of one project task to another resulted in a deeper intergration for desk and cross team collaboration
✅ Adding business tooling increased reliance on Desk
Project management tooling allowed a greater range of problems to be solved quiker across an entire support ticket process
✅ Adding multiple tasks increasd agent efficiency
Creating multiple project managament tasks quickly allowed for ticket creation numbers to drastically increase. This massively improved the dependance on Desk as a problem solving tool.
✅ Adding reminders removed 3rd party spend
The lack of need for 3rd party tooling allowed budget to be available and directed towards Desk as a one-stop solution for solcing support tickets
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Made in 2025 | Brad Rushton