Research was at the heart of all of our designs regardless of size or complexity. In my time at Salesforce I was given the opportunity to drive the conversation with research, users insight and validation. We acted as an internal agency and funded many of our R&D efforts by performing daily research for all of the product groups in Salesforce.

Our department straddled Product Marketing and the Digital Strategy Group, performing hundreds of usability studies all over the world as we developed out the Salesforce design system.  We also had a full suite of other research services providing full studies, ranging from everything around tree testing, eye tracking, competitive analysis, brand sentiment studies and focus groups to multiyear studies, identifying personas about not only the users of the product but into the users of the website.

We approached the Salesforce properties themselves as extensions of the product and product in and of themselves. We had the support of our fellow researchers and the full resources of Salesforce to do research in house, or work with research partners across the globe depending on urgency, scope and priority of the research questions we were being asked.

Our primary lab was centrally located in San Francisco which allowed us to easily recruit participants from nearby offices/companies. We typically only used this lab for quick usability or mobile studies to prevent what we found to be the “Bay Area bubble” where most users were technically advanced and usually familiar with technical terms and concepts that were not reflective of other areas of the country.

While much of our research focused on the website and marketing and advertisement initiatives, we also explored questions around the complete journey including help and training, up-sale and cross-sale of new features within the product, and installation and activation of 3rd party plugins within Salescloud and beyond.

We had a tremendous opportunity each year to partner with larger Salesforce research teams at Dreamforce, which put us in contact with users, customers and prospects. This opportunity allowed us to perform guerilla recruitment and testing among the roughly 170,000 attendees every year.

Having such a large and eager recruitment pool was exciting as a research team, and we had the opportunity to shape the websites and Salesforce products in many ways with a degree of ease not typical of most research teams. 

Each year at Dreamforce we would mobilize the entire UX team to answer questions, perform surveys and conduct tests to not only conduct the primary research but also mentor and teach the entire team outside of research. This provided excellent teachable moments for designers and junior staff on how to recruit users, perform tests and practice the art of low price ad-hoc usability testing methods in an environment that was friendly and low-risk.

One of my primary focuses as an individual contributor and later the head of research was our global navigation. A lot of time and effort was spent across the company to redesign and refine the global navigation across all the sites, to take what was once 20 different navigation paradigms and first standardize it but then create a seamless nav that went into the product or logged in experience.

The eternal battle against stakeholders to “shove” things into the global nav was constant, but the introduction of new acquisitions of whole product lines and features was also a fulltime thankless job.

Despite the difficulty, I enjoyed the deep involvement of such a high priority and high visibility project that took me all over the world testing the localization of the information architecture and new interaction concepts that were developed to support the immense amount of content that had to live in it.

In my time at Salesforce, I participated and helped drive the strategy of the large content and routing ecosystem that exists now across Salesforce properties worldwide. We developed everything from the ground up with no shortcuts around the experiences of initial product discovery, product demonstration and adopting through support. We leveraged the AEM platform as it promised to provide the capabilities of deep personalization of the journey across all of the channels.

The role helped me and my team define, analyze and build things like the Chat bots, interactive multimedia libraries, Help & training portals and large event registration ecosystems that were using the latest in cutting edge technology that are global, scalable and and based on UX best practices to elevate our public facing properties to be award winning and best in class.

Design thinking sessions helped us to understand and optimize the journey that our user took in the discovery of Salesforce products services and support. We worked across silos and departments to ensure that all stakeholders had a voice and were able to provide input on the creative process.

We spent considerable time thinking about the various stages in which someone makes a decision, and mapping each touch point to create interactions with content or the brand via multi-channel journeys that created moments of delight and kept the user engaged. My work was focused on how a user’s behavior differs in the various stages, starting from before the marketing funnel and continuing on after for support, training and customization.

I drove the strategy and design of the content marketing ecosystem, and how first-time new users arrived on the site that was not specifically or directly related to Salesforce products or services. Working with SMEs, writers and stakeholders, we created a complex section that contained rich top-of-funnel content as well as in depth content about related topics eventually leading to product information, all within a centrally located location in the primary nav.

Personalization

We aimed to prove that we could in fact improve our metrics—like increasing conversions, user satisfaction, and event registration—when we addressed what we thought the users were looking for, and reduced friction associated with navigating a large enterprise site.

Personalization was a promise of AEM, and ensuring that we delivered the right message at the right time to the right person was central in our personalization strategy. We identified the simple opportunities that we could leverage to personalize things like the home page and menus and journeys, and started by running small pilots across small subsets of users.

The devil is always in the details. It turned out that ensuring we were collecting all of the correct analytics and tracking data that were granular enough from the users’ behavior, while tying it into demographic information, product information from a logged in state, and stitching all that together to form a coherent picture and plan was more difficult than we thought.