SALESFORCE
Unlocking the power of analytics to create new growth opportunities for businesses
Challenge
To enable new mobile analytics tools for Salesforce platform customers including business analysts, sales representatives and developers.
Outcome
Extending the Salesforce Wave platform to tablet devices while building consistent design patterns, the preferred user experience and prioritization of new features.
Team
I worked as a product designer with one other lead product designer, user researcher, product manager, and a team of 5 engineers.
Customers need consistency, certainty and precision
"The Business User"
"The Analyst"
"The Dev"
Data has proven its value as a powerful communication tool for organizations including corporations, government agencies, and small businesses. With the pace and scale of new information, Salesforce customers need to make decisions quickly, efficiently, and with the highest level of clarity.
How do we give users the right data they need in the right moments?
Jessie, a data analyst, begins her day by opening her analytics homepage. She can view her favorite projects, apps, dashboards and visual lenses.
A colleague sent her a message about the 'Top Opportunities App' and fiscal year projections. Jessie checks it out to see what changes have been made.
To gain more details about the fiscal year performance, she selects the 2015 Fiscal Year Projections dashboard. Jessie wants to gain greater insights into the New Product Opportunities.
Jessie views the New Product Opportunities lens and can start to see long-term patterns and insights. She can also modify the visualization to meet her needs and share with others.
Prototyping the full experience
The Salesforce Wave Analytics platform allows customers to customize their workflow and data visualizations, as well as interact and share insights with other team members. I build a prototype with Pixate to demonstrate the full end-to-end experience for a user which was also used during usability sessions.
Customizing your dashboard
Based on user feedback and prototyping during the usability sessions, myself and the researcher learned that users wanted greater control over their workflow. I created a feature in the prototype to allow customers to customize their home view, dashboard and visualization types.
The above user flow demonstrates the standard process for how someone can open the analytics tool and view a data lens. They can modify the information and choose to clone, create snapshot or share the visualization with someone. Click on the image to view in detail.
Research and process
Competitive Landscape
The analytics industry is booming with several tools available on the market. Salesforce needs to position itself to serve the right users and the right tools to be competitive. They can accomplish this with high usability and the right balance of advanced features.
Prototyping
I was able to validate design decisions quickly through rapid prototypes and screen mockups to get feedback, not only from users, but also from the engineering and development team. 
Concept Failures
Several design decisions just did not work. The adjacent concept directions for the home page of a customer's app required a new a more complex layout type that would have required additional development and design resources, while not providing any additional user value.
Key learnings
When building a new channel experience, actively seeks ways to leverage built components and styles already in production. Several design directions I created required new components to be built by the product engineering team. The mobile analytics team was lean and utilized an aggressive release schedule. Be thoughtful on when and how to request resources for more complex requirements, and where those requirements fit into the product roadmap.
WORK
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