A few years ago, I had the chance to attend a presentation by Seth Bain at the New York Salesforce World Tour. Seth is a Design guru and practices his expertise both as a Design Coach at Stanford while also holding the title “Strategic Innovation Partner” at Salesforce. At that time I was about a year into my career as a Salesforce Consultant and, like many, entered the space without a formal background in technology.
Seth put a diagram up during his presentation that was really quite simple, but fundamentally changed the way I would think about any Salesforce project for years to come.
Here’s the diagram (edited from original form):
Seth was not actually lecturing about Sales Cloud or Service Cloud, but when he displayed the diagram to the right, the message still stuck: Every design concept should begin with people, and any type of innovation within your business is influenced by people.
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Organizational Innovation is driven by the relationship between the people that make up your business and your business itself; Processes, Methodologies, etc.
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Functional Innovation is driven by the relationship between the people that make up your business and the technology your people use; Sales Tools, CRM, Hardware, etc.
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Process Innovation is driven by the relationship between the business and the technology the business uses.
Simple right? Sounds kind of like common sense, but I found many Salesforce Implementation projects in the SMB market are often swayed in the opposite direction; away from the input of the users who were intended to use it. I found that many conversations with SMB leadership groups never really evolved into conversations including their employees. Salesforce is ultimately a tool that will be utilized by workers, and a system that is not designed for the worker will be inefficient.
A couple of tips on how to engage your users while creating a Salesforce UI/UX design Plan
Shadow your Users
Capturing your sales or service process is often the focus of net-new implementations. However, whats often overlooked is documenting exactly how these processes are carried out. For example we can ask the following Discovery questions:
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What tabs/apps do your users have open on their screen at the same time?
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What information do they have to dig for in order to complete their job?
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How many clicks does it take them to fulfill a simple request?
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Are there repetitive actions that don’t require thought?
Document and Observe Communication Channels Utilized by your Users
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Are they communicating through various channels throughout the day to full-fill prospecting requirements?
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What does their communication look like internally with other team members?
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Do they have email threads for certain programs or groups?
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Are they constantly attaching & sending documents in messages?
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How are other members alerted of an approval or completion of a dependent task?
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The above two steps are just the tip of the iceberg, but its a solid foundation to build upon as you begin to digitize operations. If you can successfully mirror and improve upon your worker’s current navigation as well as centralize communications there is a good chance you’ll be making them more efficient.
We can help you get your employees using Salesforce, contact us to find out how.