- Did you know, demand for design skills is growing
amongst Salesforce admin employers.
(upbeat music)
♪ Awesome Admin ♪
Welcome to awesome admins to episode one
of being an innovator with design.
I'm Rebecca Saar, and I am super excited
for you to unlock your inner designer.
We are kicking off a six episode series where
we will go step by step to understand our users challenges
and redesign the account page,
leveraging principles of relationship design.
First, you'll learn about
the primary design thinking phases.
And then we'll follow LeeAnne,
as she shows us how to leverage our new skills
to build the ultimate account page that gives our users
that 360 degree view of their customer.
So you can follow along and build the exact same page we are
or you can show us your creativity
and build a page that solves your unique business needs.
For episode one, we're getting an overview
of design thinking and a brief introduction
to Salesforce's new evolution of design,
relationship design.
I'm excited to hear
from architect, admin, evangelist, LeeAnne Rimel.
And our very special guest, principal design architect
and advocate, Adam Doti, from the designer relations team.
We'll learn what you can do to take your page designs
to that next level, so you can ensure
your users are having the best experience possible.
- Thanks Rebecca.
So I'm here with Adam Doti, design all star.
And we are super excited to dive
into the world of relationship design.
Hi Adam.
- Thanks for having me LeeAnne and Rebecca.
It's a pleasure to be a guest on the Be an Innovator Series.
I'm excited for the adventure too.
It's been a very busy year for design at Salesforce.
We've been building a design
and a designer relations program,
and rolling the new practice of relationship design
out to our trailblazer community.
And partnering with awesome admins like yourself to elevate
and skill up on design best practices.
- And design skills can be a game changer
for how admins implement customizations.
But before we dive into how our awesome admins
can become better design thinkers,
can you tell me a little bit more
about what relationship design means
and how that relates to design thinking?
- Yeah, absolutely.
So relationship design is actually a practice
anybody can adopt.
It's an evolution of design
from product design to service design.
And then from service design to relationship design.
And where product design is a focus on a single object,
like a shoe that is sold to a consumer
or a user in a transaction, service design focuses
on the overall experience users have,
not only with the product,
but the experience of that shoe brand across channels,
like storefronts and online shopping carts as well.
Perhaps your users' or customers' experiences
with your company and Salesforce
is just one of these channels.
Relationship design focuses on the reciprocal relationship
between customers, employees, and communities over time.
Some of the most successful companies
like Starbucks have been practicing it
for years right here in plain sight.
It's the fabric of their design minded business.
Introduce design thinking, early ideas
around design thinking can be traced back
to the early, early 1900's, been around a long time.
It's essentially just a mindset
and a methodology based on teamwork and collaboration.
Design thinking is essentially a series
of conversations to identify the needs
and eventually a solution.
Design thinking is also a non-linear process,
but for the purposes of our Be an Innovator Series,
we're gonna keep to a simple linear flow.
While the fundamentals of design thinking are easy to adopt,
to fully realize the value, teams must continue to integrate
and refine the practice and learn over time.
It's not a one and done activity.
There is some variations in the phases
of the design thinking process.
But the most common phrases are empathize,
define, ideate, prototype, build and deliver, and validate.
You'll often see these phases visually represented
in the classic double diamond shown here.
You can further bucket these phases
into three broad chapters.
At Salesforce, we call these chapters,
generally the understand phase,
the create phase, and the deliver phase.
And over the course of this series
we'll be introducing each phase
and how designing admins can scale up on design thinking.
- So you mentioned something that really stuck out to me,
which is that this is not a one and done exercise
for admins. This is something that they should
revisit, come back to, really build
into how they are designing customizations.
What are some of the effects and implications
you see for admins bringing design
thinking into their app building?
- By the practicing design thinking, and considering,
and bringing this expanded awareness
as well as your diverse stakeholder representation
into your problem solving,
you're investing in the long-term success of your projects.
And, in turn, the communities that they impact.
For the purposes of this series,
we'll be focusing on the fundamentals
of design thinking and give you a baseline
from which you can continue
your learning journey on Trailhead.
And build your relationship design practice.
At the end of this episode,
Rebecca will share some resources.
We're gonna learn more about relationship design
and design thinking.
And I hope this series inspires everybody watching to
become a lifelong admin designing student.
- I hope so too.
And I think that there's some really great
design content that we have planned for you,
our admins in this series, starting with this episode.
And this episode is called Start with Empathy.
So tell me more about why design thinking
starts with empathy.
How come I can't just jump
into app builder and start building right off the go?
- I often wanna jump right in too. I'm excited to start
designing on Lightening as well.
But pausing and establishing a deep understanding
of your users, their goals, their motivations
their struggles, is the cornerstone
of a human-centered design process.
And that's the focus here.
It's also the foundation
from which design thinking is based.
So as an admin, you must connect
with and understand your end users.
In the conventional product design development process,
somebody, typically a product manager
or a stakeholder, gives a direction to build a thing
or a feature. Then it's designed or configured,
typically under tight constraints,
controlled by technical limitations.
Then it's developed and launched.
While this technically meets the business requirements
or the functional spec, leaves the human out of the process.
The human that you're designing for, the end user.
When you engage with your users to understand what they need
and how they feel when using your product,
you build trust with them.
- So you mentioned, and you talked
about the impact on admins building design
thinking into their process and the impact on the users.
What's the larger business impact
of adopting this human-centered approach?
- Yeah, having a human-centered approach
involving your users, involving your stakeholders
and your fellow makers, your teammates, in every phase
of your project, will inevitably lead to better experiences.
Over time this will lead to happier users,
improved NPS scores, better C-SAT scores,
reduced support cases,
and eventually reduced tech and design debt.
- So there's definitely a concrete business value
with adding design thinking.
It sounds like this is also really becoming
an in demand skill for our admin community.
- Yes, absolutely.
In demand design skills are among admin job postings,
will be growing by 22% just in the next few years.
- So I'm hooked, let's dive into our demo scenario
so we can start building design thinking into our process.
So in this scenario, we're going to be working
in an environment that most of you see often,
the account page that has not
yet been customized to meet our users' needs.
Here we are in the account page.
It is a great page.
It's a useful page.
However, it could be more useful for our users.
Today they have to leave and go into other parts of the app
to accomplish some basic tasks.
And we know our users could have a better page,
but we need to find exactly what this page should look
and feel like. In order to design with empathy,
like Adam discussed, we wanna hear from our users
to better understand their needs and priorities.
So to do this, we're gonna take a look
at our user feedback Quip worksheet,
and talk to our end user Adam.
So Adam, our end user,
what is working well on the account page?
- I feel like the help text is helpful, it's very useful.
So it also works on my mobile phone device, that's nice.
I can do business from my phone.
Lastly, I also feel like it's easy to access the basic info,
in the highlights, like phone number and email.
- Great, thank you for sharing that with me, Adam.
I've added it to the worksheet.
Now, could you share with me some things
that are challenging for you as an end user
when you work with the account page?
- Yeah, I feel like I'm always, too much scrolling.
I feel like I'm doing a lot of scrolling.
I have to open too many browser tabs
to access additional related data.
I feel like there's too many clicks and too many tabs.
Lastly, it's hard for me to discern
what data and actions are relevant for me,
and what's not relevant for me.
- Thank you for sharing that with me.
So in this exercise, I, as an admin,
I'm interviewing my end user, Adam,
and adding that information to this worksheet.
This helps me get information
I may not have had otherwise to empathize
with my end user and to learn more
about what they like and what they don't like
about their current experience.
This exercise will prepare you for the next phase
when we work to synthesize the data
and look to identify trends and topics across our words.
Now let's hear from Rebecca.
- Thank you, Adam and LeeAnne,
for sharing your insights on relationship design
and design thinking.
To summarize some key takeaways I have,
one, there are six phases of design thinking.
There's empathize, define, ideate,
prototype, build, and validate.
And we're gonna go through all of them.
Next, design thinking is a human-centered approach,
that's why we start with empathy.
And last, but and most important,
design skills are growing in demand.
And in fact, they're expected to grow by over 20%
within the job listings for Salesforce admins
over the next few years.
That's why it's so important to join us on this journey.
Okay, so now it's your turn.
Complete the Start with Empathy Quip worksheet,
and fill out at least three cards
for each section, the working well
and the challenges sections.
You could make a copy of this template.
You could share it with some of your users.
And then once you're done, don't forget to share
on Twitter using the hashtag, be an innovator.
Now just a quick note, design thinking is a team activity,
not a solo exercise.
So if you can't gather your full team
to do these exercises with, maybe you can gather just
a few friends or a super user to get their insights.
And if that is also a challenge, no worries,
reflect upon a recent situation or scenario you experienced
and use those insights for the basis of these exercises.
All right, I know we shared a lot of great information
in this episode. So we do have more resources
for you to dive deeper in our trailmix,
definitely check that out. And then join us
for episode two of Be an Innovator with design,
where we will learn how to define the challenge.
(upbeat music)