Get Users Involved in your Salesforce org Design!
User experience (UX) is an integral part of any software, but it is significant for any company implementing software like Salesforce, where user adoption is critical for success.
A well-designed system allows users to navigate through it easily, find what they need quickly, and engage with it. UX makes the design feel intuitive and effortless, meaning more likely to be adopted. However, it can make the design feel clunky and challenging to navigate when done wrong, causing confusion, frustration, and low user adoption.
Let’s break down the importance of a well-designed system and the users’ critical role in designing such a system.
Laying the Foundation: Why is a UX Design Initiative Important?
User experience is the overall feel of a website or application. It can be broken up into two components: usability and feel.
Usability refers to how easy a website or app is to navigate and how easy it is to use the website’s features in flexible ways.
Feel is the emotional connection users have with a website or app. It’s how users feel when they visit your website or log in to an app.
When designing a system, you need to figure out what kind of experience you want your users to have and how the design will help you achieve it. Before beginning design work, gather information on your users. Understand their pain points and daily process to devise a design action plan. Unfortunately, one of the biggest mistakes companies make is that they don’t treat UX design as a strategic initiative.
Treating UX design as a critical component in your organization’s growth strategy is an investment that will pay off in the short term and the long term, helping guide and keep you focused on your goals for the system.
When it comes to setting goals, the type of goals you set depends significantly on your business, but consider one of your goals to make the navigation through Salesforce easier. Navigation is a critical part of any system. If you want your users to have a positive experience, you can set goals to improve the way users navigate the system and complete tasks.
Understanding and Getting Users Involved
User behavior is one of the most important things to understand when designing your Salesforce user experience. Unfortunately, many companies don’t often prioritize setting time aside to ask users individually or as a group what they need the system to do. We find that taking the time early on in the process to understand the users’ needs goes along in completing the project successfully and on time, but most of all with increased user adoption.
If you are looking for inspiration on how to gather crucial information from your users, these are some questions we recommend you ask:
What is the easiest task to accomplish right now?
What is the most challenging task to accomplish?
How many different systems are they using currently to do their work?
What are the top three things they would like a new system to help them with?
What are their frustrations and pain points with the current system and process?
What would help them achieve their goals more quickly?
What would improve their experience?
Once you research, design, and build, get users involved in testing your design and solicit feedback. Ask them about features they would like to see or issues they had while using the software. By getting users involved in testing your design, you can uncover problems that may have been overlooked during the design process.
Benefits of Getting Users Involved in the Design Process
Smoother Rollouts: For every new feature or functionality you add to Salesforce, you must implement a rollout strategy. Rollouts are typically scheduled in advance and may involve a series of staged releases to ensure the best experience for your users. Getting users interested in the design process makes for a much smoother rollout process.
Accessibility for all: Involving users in the early design phases is fundamental to an accessible solution. This will broaden your perspective and lead you to discover new ways of thinking about how the system works for more people in different scenarios, making it work better for them!
Design with Flexibility in Mind: Understanding that we don’t all do things the same way is crucial for designing a flexible system. The best way to think about designing for flexibility is to imagine a sliding scale. At one end is a very rigid system that forces users to do things exactly as designed. At the other end is an entirely flexible system that allows users to do things any way they want. The truth is most systems we design fall somewhere in between. We have found that you’ll get more buy-in from users if they feel like they’ve been heard and that the system was designed with their needs in mind.
Clarity and better outcomes: Including users in the design process helps eliminate assumptions and gives companies insights into how people use the system. Talking to them and showing them what you’re working on will also help keep things clear, which lead to better outcomes for your business.
Final Thoughts
When it comes to Salesforce (or any software implementation), UX is often taken for granted, but it is an integral part of any solution. Designing an effective user experience requires a careful balance of research, creativity, and engineering.
User feedback is crucial in system design. Getting a user’s perspective will give you a better understanding of their day-to-day tasks, giving you a leg up on designing a system that users will love.
If you’re planning an implementation project and are looking for a partner to guide you through these crucial steps, reach out to us here.
