Needle - Customer Chat Console
Needle - Customer Chat Console from Christian Larsen
Needle - Customer Chat Console

Needle provides an online customer support platform that connects communities of passionate at-home product experts – or “advocates” – to online shoppers on major retailing websites like Adidas, Nike, Coach, and Overstock to give them a superior customer experience.

In this project, Needle sought to update the existing chat console from a desktop-only version to work on mobile devices too, thereby increasing the chat opportunities on their partner's web sites and enable mobile engagements.

Early wireframes were shown and tested on internal and external customers. The final solution was built in Twitter Bootstrap and AngularJS. By taking advantage of the features of Bootstrap, we were able to build a chat console that scaled for both desktop and mobile devices.

While the mobile version reached the goal of enabling chats with mobile customers, we continue to iterate and refine the design today based on usability feedback.

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What if you could get a trusted opinion on a product from another die-hard user of a brand of products - a product fan or "advocate" - before you actually buy it? Through the use of Needle's service, you can.
While shoppers are browsing products online, through a rule-based system, Needle offers invites to pre-screened users to chat with product experts.
Once in the service, shoppers have the option to share their name before starting or just get right into the chatting to save them time.
Establishing an advocate's credibility is a key part of building trust with a customer. We explored various ways to let a customer explore an advocate's areas of expertise.
Advocates can recommend products to the customer in the chat stream. Customers can then view details about the product in the console or on the partner's product detail page on their web site.
Each of my visual designs has a detailed explanation of the definition and interaction of the page elements.
Customers can flip the product card over for additional info about a product.
As a way to improve communication between customer and advocate, the console designs show a drawing toolkit that take advantage of a mobile phone's touch capabilities.
We looked at creating a unique tablet experience but our tests showed us that customers preferred to see the product page as they shopped that the mobile view offered them so we scrapped our "tablet view" in favor of the more compact "mobile view" on tablets.
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Needle - Customer Chat Console

Needle provides an online customer support platform that connects communities of passionate at-home product experts – or “advocates” – to online shoppers on major retailing websites like Adidas, Nike, Coach, and Overstock to give them a superior customer experience.

In this project, Needle sought to update the existing chat console from a desktop-only version to work on mobile devices too, thereby increasing the chat opportunities on their partner's web sites and enable mobile engagements.

Early wireframes were shown and tested on internal and external customers. The final solution was built in Twitter Bootstrap and AngularJS. By taking advantage of the features of Bootstrap, we were able to build a chat console that scaled for both desktop and mobile devices.

While the mobile version reached the goal of enabling chats with mobile customers, we continue to iterate and refine the design today based on usability feedback.

View Website
Available
Freelance, Full-time
Christian Larsen
Director of UX at MRM Salt Lake City, UT