To kickoff a mobile-first design initiative, all Salesforce product areas were challenged to define their mobile vision. As a member of the Platform UX Team, I was already well aware of the complex interfaces that our Salesforce admins typically user, so we viewed the mobile challenge as an opportunity to simplify their experience.
After our initial presentation, our team was encouraged to continue developing our ideas for a final presentation in front of Salesforce executives. Winners would receive prizes, but our team was set on actually having the app built.
We quickly interviewed multiple Salesforce administrators to see which features they wanted to see in a mobile administration app.
We also looked to a study I had previous conducted on the system-monitoring site called “Trust”. These findings pointed us to a need for a robust and customizable alerts system.
With our research in hand, we went back to the whiteboard to rethink our information architecture.
We progressively added more detail to our designs to refine our interactions, information architecture, and visual design. Here sketches facilitated many major discussions.
Wireframes helped us better understand the spatial constraints of the phone without focusing on pixel perfect screens that can slow down innovative thinking.
Finally we moved to high fidelity mock ups and a fully interactive prototype.
We knew that they were going to have to wow our executives to convince them to built this application. This is why we decided to capture actual users interacting with out prototype at a Cloudforce event in San Francisco.
After shooting some excellent responses from our admins, we storyboarded our presentations for our executives.
This is the actual video we used to sell executives. Please keep in mind that this was originally created for an internal audience. Using little more than this video we won the mobile design challenge and had our executives ears for funding a team to actually build it.
Though by the time the team was fully funded, I had moved to the free trials project, I was still able to consult with the production team to see through the initial vision.
In the Dreamforce keynote demo which focused on going (back) to the future of Salesforce, co-founders Marc Benioff and Parker Harris unveiled the SalesforceA application to a screaming group of Salesforce administrators and to over 100,000 attendants in November of 2013.