How do we set our customers up for long-term success?

Since 2018, our team has been discovering and redefining how to help customers onboard and learn. We started with solution for Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud. In Release 230, all of this braintrust evolved into the Guidance Center (GA for Sales, Service and CRM).

Timeline

  • 2018
    We launched our first in-app experience as a new navigational tab in Sales Cloud. Over the year, we

  • 2019
    We partnered with the Marketing Cloud product team to launch a similar setup guidance page within their Admin portal

  • 2020
    We partnered with the Platform team to launch the Guidance Center, reusing many of the established patterns from the previous years. It went live in 230, and continues to be supported through 2021.

  • 2021
    We continued to research and enhance the Guidance Center. This is now serving as the foundation for Salesforce Easy.

We wrapped these in-app experiences with personalized and dynamic journey campaigns (email, SMS, print, direct mail, etc.) to support each user’s learning at every stage.

Design prototypes and research analysis can be made available upon request if you’re a Salesforce employee.

 

My Responsibilities

UX Design

For the early iterations in 2018, I led system and flow design. In 2020, I partnered with a senior designer to bring this experience into the Side Panel. I also developed the UI styles for Scenario Icons.

Research

I assisted with the research study design, interview scripts, user recruitment, and research analysis.

Workshop Facilitation

For our early iterations in 2018 and 2019, I facilitated a series of workshops between different Salesforce departments to get the customer journey experience roughed out for our personas.

 
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Challenge

How can we make it easier and more effective for customers to complete crucial stages like org setup, update to the latest features, and learn from industry best practices in order to be successful?

We’ve heard from customers that Onboarding is the most crucial and most challenging phase of Salesforce. As a business, we also want to retain as many customers as possible.

 
 

Personas

Admins and End Users for Sales, Service, Marketing and CRM

Process

  • Ideation Workshop

  • Gather Requirements

  • Lo-fi Sketches

  • Mid-fi Sketches with Stakeholder Feedback

  • User Research

  • Hi-fi Sketches handed off to Engineering

User click path (232)

 
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Successes

  • In our first release in 2018, we increased conversions by 8% from free trail to paid orgs after our experience went live in Sales Cloud

  • Our team launched the experiences for Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Service Cloud inside of a calendar year.

  • Our initial designs laid the groundwork for the Guidance Center in 230.

“I wanted to take this time to personally thank you for all the amazing work you did with our team and Product. Visualizing UX design while also mapping content is not a skillset many people possess, myself included, and you helped bridge together our content needs with Product's UX vision.”

— Jason L., on the Marketing Cloud Get Started project