Vox: a community where users helped each other
I designed and built Vox, a training site and user forum for Sphere, and launched it within three months. Repeat support tickets fell by two-thirds, daily use averaged 8,000 people, and 80–85% of survey respondents were promoters for four consecutive years.
- Role
- Designed and built it
- Built in
- WordPress, three months
- Recognition
- Considered for Comcast's Circle of Achievement award
The ask
Create a learning site for Sphere, with how-to videos from our ed tech team, guided tours, and a guide to Sphere's design language and vocabulary. It launched as P2 Learning.
The challenge
- Repeated tickets. QA received many tickets about the same issues and the same enhancement requests.
- Unclear priorities. Ticket priority levels in Jira and Rally were often inflated, making the most urgent issues harder to find.
- Limited connection between users. People had few ways to share knowledge with colleagues in their own divisions.
The approach
- A community forum. The Workshop gave users a place to ask questions and share answers with colleagues across their division. The site was later renamed P2 Vox.
- A home for explaining change. Vox later hosted guidance such as the explanation of how Planning's AI predictions worked.
- The Construction Portal. A companion learning platform for subcontractors, who aren't Comcast employees, where they train on Comcast's field technologies and earn certifications. It met security, legal, and WCAG requirements.
Outcomes
- ⅔ fewer
- repeat support tickets
- 8,000 a day
- average users, rising to 30,000 on release days
- 80–85%
- promoters in every survey for four years
What didn't go to plan
Early participation in the Workshop was low, because users were hesitant to post. I worked with the QA team to respond to every post with appreciation, and to explain how and when feedback would be shared with the wider team. As people saw their input welcomed, participation grew.
Turning point
Seeing users answer each other's questions. The forum connected colleagues who hadn't had a way to reach one another, and support became something the community shared.
What I learned
Support doesn't always need to come from a help desk. Giving users a way to learn from one another can be just as effective.