Illustration is an effective communication tool that helps brands explain ideas, tell stories, and create memorable customer experiences. Unlike generic imagery, illustrations can be tailored to reflect a brand's personality, values, and tone of voice. They provide immediate visual context, help capture attention, and make information easier to understand. When integrated thoughtfully into digital products and services, illustration can become a core part of the customer journey rather than simply a decorative element. It helps brands stand out in crowded markets while creating stronger emotional connections with customers.
Creating Effective Digital Help & Support Experiences
Support experiences provide a safety net which customers can rely on. Here's how to nail them every time.
Your digital Help & Support experience is the safety net for your family of digital products and services.
Here are some tips on making sure this part of your experience works well for your customers when they need it.
Help & Support sections are an often-neglected part of many digital platforms, whenever we get a brief to work on them, part of me jumps for joy. They’re usually inconsistent in look and feel when considered against the rest of the experience, hard to navigate or even to find. But they’re the silent workhorse supporting your products and services. To that end, I believe these hard-working and cost-saving hubs deserve more attention than they’re currently receiving.
Now, you might think that you should simply focus on building the best, most intuitive self-service platform making it so good it doesn’t need Help & Support. Sometimes, this works if you have a relatively straightforward product or service with minimal journeys. Anything beyond that and something will fall through the cracks. At that point, a good Help & Support platform is critical to your overall user experience.
It’s not as easy as it might sound – having customers effectively use a digital Help & Support platform is a change management process. Think about it: if you were a customer, would you move from a tried-and-tested helpline to a strange-and-unfamiliar help platform? Me neither.
To make this work, we have to understand the comfort that customers need and make sure that these platforms are designed to deliver it. It has to be easier, quicker and better to use than picking up the phone. To validate this we use customer research to inform design decisions about these platforms: exploring hopes, fears, barriers and motivations underlying using digital Help & Support.
Here are a few things we’ve learnt along the way:
1. Please, don’t just pull the helpline
It’s easy to think that once you pull the customer helpline, people will naturally move to the digital Help & Support section. But effectively redirecting people into these channel matters, without it their complaints could go anywhere: customer support emails, your social media platforms, or even your competitors.
It’s important to keep the service design thinking throughout all of this and make sure that other touch-points are still available as appropriate. Making your helpline prominently visible is an interesting experiment in itself – are your customers turning to it out of habit, or are they unable to find the help they need? The former is a behavioural insight, the latter is a product insight – both can be designed around, but you will never know the underlying frustration if the helpline is gone.
2. People looking for help are generally not in the best of moods
A customer looking for Help & Support is often feeling frustrated, angry and (literally) helpless. That’s a bad emotional state to be in meaning it’s not the time to be asking customers to learn complex and difficult interactions. More than anything else, Help & Support is about time to satisfaction.
Customers will use a digital help section if they perceive that it will give them answers faster than a helpline, but picture this: you go through an arduous journey just trying to find the help section. After you get there it’s either impossible to use or does not have the information you need. In that moment, the amount of time before they can get help starts to feel like it’s extending to infinity. And that’s when they pick up the phone, long call waiting times and all – a disgruntled nightmare.
3. The help section is a product in itself
The help section often suffers from nobody’s child syndrome. We get it – you’re a product centred company and your core products rightfully get the lion’s share of resources and attention. But the help section is a product too – it’s the product which supports your other products. Having a dedicated product team looking at it and giving it time, care and attention will ensure that it integrates seamlessly and efficiently with the other products it supports, and remains effective for its users.
Ultimately, the key is to keep in mind that your Help & Support service is a safety net: it’s not the star of the show, it may not even be used most of the time, but you need to keep it in good condition because it will save customer relationships. Find the comfort that your customers are looking for, understand what cracks customers are falling through and stay curious to why it sees use. This will serve you in more ways than one. And please, don’t just pull the helpline!
Digital Support - FAQS
Illustration helps reduce cognitive load by allowing users to understand concepts visually before reading detailed content. It can support onboarding journeys, explain complex services, guide users through processes, and reinforce important messages throughout a digital experience. When combined with clear UX writing, illustrations make content easier to digest and improve overall comprehension. By communicating ideas quickly and effectively, illustrations help users navigate products and services with greater confidence and less effort.
Many organizations operate in industries where products, services, or processes can be difficult for customers to understand. Illustration can transform complicated information into accessible visual narratives that are easier to process and remember. Spot illustrations, diagrams, and visual storytelling techniques can simplify technical concepts, break information into manageable sections, and help customers understand value propositions more quickly. This makes illustrations particularly valuable for sectors such as finance, healthcare, technology, education, and professional services.
A consistent illustration style can become a unique brand asset that customers instantly recognize. When used across websites, applications, social media, presentations, and marketing campaigns, illustrations help create a cohesive visual language that reinforces brand identity. Custom illustrations can communicate a brand's values and personality more effectively than stock imagery while helping organizations differentiate themselves from competitors. Over time, a distinctive illustration style contributes to stronger brand recognition, trust, and customer loyalty.
Before investing in illustration, organizations should carefully evaluate how the style aligns with their brand, audience, and user experience goals. Businesses should consider whether the illustrations are inclusive, emotionally appropriate, scalable, and compatible with their existing design system. It's also important to assess how the illustration style may evolve over time and whether it will remain relevant as the brand grows. User testing can help validate that illustrations support comprehension and add meaningful value rather than creating unnecessary distractions.
Illustration delivers long-term value by improving communication, increasing engagement, and enhancing brand differentiation. Well-crafted illustrations make content more appealing, support storytelling, and help users understand information faster. They can be applied throughout the customer journey, from onboarding and product education to notifications and milestone celebrations. By enriching digital experiences and making interactions more memorable, illustration can improve customer satisfaction, strengthen brand perception, and contribute to better business outcomes over time.