Organization & Role
Helpshift (acquired by Keywords Studios) is a mobile-first customer support platform. As their first Content Designer, I created and managed all in-app copy and knowledge base content.
Project
SensAI is an AI engine for classifying new support tickets. It uses Models, which are collections of data used to train the AI, to improve the accuracy of classification. You must upload at least one Model to set up SensAI; the more historical ticket data that SensAI has access to, the more accurate it’s classification of future tickets will be.
Problem
In the same way that deleting information from your own brain would have consequences for your daily life activities, deleting a Model in SensAI can significantly decrease its ticket classification accuracy. During initial development, the team asked me to rewrite the ‘Delete Model’ pop-up.
The original copy was vague, and gave no info on what happens after a user deletes a Model.
Approach
Since deleting a Model has drastic consequences for the team’s workflow, my goals for revising this pop-up were:
- To better communicate the consequences of this action.
- To provide button copy that aligns with the outcome to prevent users from making the wrong choice.
There are cases where it does make sense for an Admin to delete a Model (mainly, to remove bad or outdated data). To make the right decisions, Admins need specifics on what will happen when they delete that specific Model – and they need to get that information before doing the irreversible.
To map out all possible outcomes, I asked the Product Manager which features are impacted when a Model is deleted.
Outcome
After learning the features that would be impacted are Analytics and Automations, I updated the copy to call that out and list which exact Automations are impacted.
The new copy presents the Admin with more precise consequences for deleting this Model, including the specific Automations that rely on it. If they still want to delete it, they’ll know to update those Automations to use a different Model to make sure their workflows run smoothly.
Another critical decision was what text to put in the two buttons. I brainstormed and pitched several button copy options, and the team ultimately decided to stick with ‘Cancel’ and ‘Confirm’. There were several reasons for this:
- A design limitation on the character count allowed in button copy prevented me from making it more specific.
- This was an advanced feature for larger support teams, so they wanted to keep this copy consistent with the destructive confirmation copy across the rest of the app.
More context on these limitations and the alternatives explored is provided below.
CTA Copy Exploration
To demonstrate the impact of different CTA copy, I researched and put together the following alternate button options for the team to review.
The extra text helps to explicitly reinforce the choice. The team decided against this option because of design limitations that could not accommodate the longer buttons that result from the extra copy.
Given this design limitation, I also tried this more concise button copy:
Though it was more succinct, and felt like an intuitive response to the ‘Are you sure you want to delete this Model’? question asked in the pop-up, the buttons on their own were too vague and not explicit enough about the decision being made.
To make the buttons clearer while keeping them concise, I wrote:
This copy has the advantage of clearly stating the ‘Delete’ action. However, ‘Back’ was not as definite as ‘Cancel’. ‘Delete’ was a favored choice, though the pairing of the ‘Cancel’ and ‘Confirm’ options was ultimately kept for consistency with the rest of the destructive confirmation pop-ups in the app.
Results
When it was initially released, SensAI was adopted by a dozen support teams. Though I don’t have any feature usage metrics I can share, during my time on the team, we did not receive a single complaint about the Model deletion options being unclear.
Additionally, our own support team never received a support inquiry about a deleted Model needing to be restored. Since as they say, sometimes no news is good news, this information leads me to deem this destructive confirmation copy a success.
