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Salesforce UX — Medium | Anwesha Samanta
A few weeks ago, a couple of us from Salesforce Analytics UX team were at a customer site to chat with users about building Analytic Apps. After learning about their process and challenges, we realized one of the main struggles our customers face is designing information — more specifically, finding a task-oriented and actionable visual representation of their business goals. They have huge amounts of data mostly in the form of spreadsheets and they find it difficult to translate that into a simple interface. We spent the rest of the afternoon walking them through the design team’s process of designing and building Analytics Apps.
The UX team conducts design studios with stakeholders, product managers, and developers to answer business questions and produce and test those ideas. In this post, I am going to break it down into a three step iterative process.
The first step is understanding your end user. One of the best ways to frame, structure, and align on information is to map the user’s path of inquiry, i.e. a structured outline of all the user’s needs to achieve their goal. You can map it out by identifying the user’s objectives and business questions.
Mapping out a path of inquiry for Sales Manager
While building our Sales Analytics App, we started with identifying our target persona. Then, we mapped out their journey to get answers to their goals. The target persona in this case was a Sales Manager who wanted to make their selling process more efficient.
Ideation centers around sharing ideas with users, product managers, developers, and designers. We do a 60–90 minutes design studio where the team gets together to sketch and share. We did many rounds of design studios for our Sales App where the entire team sketched ideas to represent forecasting, measuring team performance, and similar metrics that a Sales Manager cares about.
Materials you need for sketching session are papers, markers, stickies and most importantly an open mind.
These collaborative workshop sessions are super helpful to kickstart a vision towards the final product. A diverse team can bring in different ideas and viewpoints to the table. You emerge from these sessions with the strongest concepts and visualizations to represent them.
After the first two steps, we are left with a set of loosely organized ideas. Designing information starts with organization. A good design has a clear structure which is based on similarity and hierarchy, e.g. persona or task.
Pages in an app should be laid out so that they tell a story. The story should be focused and task-oriented to help users accomplish a goal.
We structured our Sales app based on personas such as sales leaders, managers, and reps. Each persona has a set of pages or dashboards that are structured based on tasks that they perform.
Persona based structure
To convey the right story, consider the following factors.
Pages can be laid out like a newspaper or article where they have a summary, content and conclusion.
F, Z, and Side by Side page layout
F, Z, and Side by Side layout are the most common layout we use for pages. These patterns help get the user’s attention to the summary KPIs first, followed by supporting visualizations and a detailed actions list at the end.
At first glance, the user should be able to know whether a metric is good, bad, or neutral. Information scent provides user with just the right amount of visual information that provides valuable context to provoke further curiosity.
Information scent examples
In the example above, the number $534K doesn’t have a meaning by itself. Providing contexts such as comparison to last year and adding a benchmark adds more meaning to the KPI. The user now knows if something is good or bad and can drill in further to view more details.
Choosing the right chart that derives the most important insight is vital to telling a story. Using the incorrect chart creates confusion and misrepresents the underlying data. There are a lot of studies and books written around the topic of information visualization — one of my favorites is Dona Wong’s The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics: The Dos and Don’ts of Presenting Data, Facts, and Figures.
Choosing the right chart
Using color in context helps users notice alerts and take desired actions. Keep in mind that using too many colors defeats the purpose of associating meaning with colors. Based on our experience and research sessions with customers, five is a chunk that humans can easily retain.
Use of colors in analytics
It’s important to get user feedback during this entire sprint and iterate.
For the Sales App, we started with opportunities, activities, accounts, and users datasets. The main challenge was to figure out what the end user wants to know about their business so we can work with the raw data and find the right visual representation to answer those questions. Following the design studio process, we were able to ship an amazing Sales App that makes our users’ selling process more efficient. We are continuously getting feedback from users and keep iterating to deliver actionable insights to our customers.
Analytics should not be about tracking a bunch of metrics; rather, it should be about getting insights about your data. Following a user centered design process allows us to build a consumable interface that represents complex information, delivers insights, and ultimately brings about customer success.
Transforming dataset to a consumable app
Thank you Eddie for helping guide through the design studio process and being a great mentor. Thank you Raymon for reviewing and helping edit this blog, and Steve, JD and Kathy for your valuable feedback!
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Transforming Data to Insights was originally published in Salesforce UX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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