The User Experience
As one of the first in the Salesforce ecosystem to become Certified in Salesforce’s brand-new User Experience Designer programme, I wanted to share my experiences and thoughts on the Certification, how your business can improve user experience – and, why it’s so important!
One of the main reasons for low user adoption in Salesforce is poor user experience.
But while it may seem obvious that if a platform isn’t easy to use then users won’t use it, all too often User Experience is not prioritised, or simply ignored.
Well, I am here to tell you why it should be a priority, and some of the key foundations for incorporating UX principles within your organisation’s Salesforce platform.
There are 6 key criteria to consider when building your UX within Salesforce.
Discovery
UX fundamentals
Human centered design
Declarative design
Testing
Salesforce Lightning Design System
Discovery:
User experience is the creation of meaningful and relevant experiences for users.
And how do you know what is meaningful and relevant to your users? Discovery of course!
In preparation for the exam, I focused on the importance of discovery, and the different techniques and strategies which can be employed to ensure optimal user experience.
One part of this section that I was excited to implement was the use of personas.
Personas capture large numbers of users and help you build better products by understanding users and designing for their needs. They help you keep your user at the forefront of your mind without having to remember hundreds of individuals motivations and goals.
UX fundamentals:
Here at Inardua, we love producing demos for clients, showing them the art of the possible.
They’re a key part of our design process and are met with positive reactions – but are also a great way at engaging users, and obtaining vital feedback.
You can spend hours designing a demo but if it doesn’t invoke emotion then it isn’t going to get the reaction you have worked for.
One way we attempt to bring our audience along for the ride is to create characters and a narrative for our demo. Telling a relevant story, with relatable characters means demonstrations are easy to follow, engage with, and consider how they could impact users in a real-world environment.
Honing these skills through preparing for this exam was really exciting.
Human Centred Design:
Human-centred design is a creative approach to solving people’s problems that begin with identifying their needs and ends with creating solutions—products, experiences, and services—that meet those needs.
Historically, human-centred design has been geared toward finding solutions that are desirable, feasible, and viable.
When a solution is desirable, that means people actually need it.
When a solution is feasible, that means you can actually build it.
When a solution is viable, that means it fits your organization’s business model.
Something I love about Salesforce is their push for inclusivity, both in their workforce and in the products they make. And it was once again enforced in one of the modules which make up the UX Designer exam: Inclusive Design.
Inclusive Design can be explained as ‘one size fits one’, it feels like it is made for you but everyone can use it.
The 3 Inclusive Design principles to keep in mind:
Recognise exclusion
Learn from diversity
Solve for one, extend to many.
Inclusive Design is crucial if you want to ensure widespread adoption of the Salesforce platform across your user base, ensuring value is returned and your users feel valued. It’s one reason we at Inardua look to engage with end-users whenever possible – you can’t make something work without knowing the people who will be using it!
Declarative Design:
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again… we love click not code!
We always try and adhere to the ‘click-before-code’ philosophy here at Inardua.
And it’s something which is re-iterated within the Declarative Design modules for anyone looking to become a UX Designer.
This section also covered the importance of developing a training strategy and some really useful ways to make training effective.
We know that the release is not the end of a project, and ensuring that there is good user adoption is key to a successful project and a happy customer.
So, every training strategy must:
Set expectations for how and when users should use Salesforce,
Explain how you’ll measure success,
Answer how users benefit from this new way of working.
Our training plans use a mixture of the following: training scenarios, out of the box training resources, screen recordings, in app guidance, learning paths, training documents and more to ensure that your users have the best chance of success with Salesforce.
Testing:
Testing is crucial for ensuring that what you have built is fit for purpose, functional and efficient. Approaches include:
Focus groups
Task scenarios.
Whilst you may have performed detailed discovery and may be sure you have thought of everything – it’s inevitable that things get lost in translation, or things are left unsaid.
And that’s why to ensure you’re successfully implementing UX, you’ll be wanting to carry out proper User Acceptance Testing – getting what you’ve built in front of the people who’ll be using it, and incorporating their feedback.
Testing isn’t just carried tacked on as a final stage in a project. And it’s not done simply to ensure things aren’t broken.
When testing is employed at regular intervals throughout a project you are ensuring visibility and gaining valuable insight into the user experience.
For instance, with prototyping, we start with low fidelity prototypes (such as wireframes) which are very much sketches of ideas and are still very much focused on layout, appearance and feel - rather than function.
Salesforce Lightning Design System:
A design system is a collection of repeatable design patterns and reusable code, referred to as components, kind of like a set of building blocks. Components include buttons, menus, sounds, animations, visual patterns, and more.
As a Salesforce Partner, we are able to build customisations on the platform using updated, clean and consistent components. Every Salesforce Platform we build on or configure is scalable, efficient, visually cohesive reusable and documented.
I hope you have learned something new reading this blog.
If you think your org could do with a little bit of TLC to make it just that experience for your users just a little more visually pleasing or user friendly, then please get in touch. We offer free health checks and would love to hear from you.