Enable
A smart collaborative work management platform built on Salesforce.
The Challenge
Salesforce has become strategic to thousands of businesses and continues to evolve and scale its capabilities. However, businesses are unable to achieve the full benefits of the platform due to a limited supply of talent and high costs of professional services. Our challenge was to disrupt the traditional model of Salesforce consulting with a product that enables organizations with the tools they need to build their own complex solutions on the Salesforce platform.
My Role
As the Design Lead on a small team, I was responsible for all aspects of design from inception to first release. This included user research, prototyping, testing, development hand off, quality assurance and occasional build support.
Team
A core group of 5 Developers, a Product Manager, a QA Specialist and two designers.
Length
1 Year
User Interviews
In the early stages of the project, I conducted 20 interviews with a range of target users across several industries to learn about the tools and processes that were being leveraged by internal teams to develop solutions for their own and client organizations. Focusing on user goals, needs, obstacles and challenges, each interview was codified and analyzed to uncover patterns in the qualitative data. While a number of key themes emerged, ones that were of particular interest to us were frustrations with the number of tools necessary to plan and deliver a solution, difficultly maintaining a single source of truth throughout the design and development life cycle and a lack of process around documenting solutions for future improvements.
A chart which illustrates common themes that emerged throughout the user research and analysis stage. This was based on individual pieces of sentiment collected during interviews.
A screenshot of a sheet which was used to track individual codified pieces of sentiment collected during user interviews.
Personas
With a solid base of goals, challenges and needs uncovered during the research phase, I created five personas to represent the target users of our product. The personas were primarily built around functional roles and skills found within a typical Salesforce development project with some playing a more technical role and others leveraging more non-technical skills. Ultimately this set of personas helped us build empathy for our end users, connect to the problems that they face everyday and focus on the things that matter most to them.
Maria, a project manager, was considered a power user and primary persona for our product.
Current State Journeys
Mapping out current state journeys allowed us to zero in on specific obstacles and highlight opportunities for our product to fill key gaps. These maps were based on sentiment and observations from user research and analysis. In this current state journey map, our project Manager, Maria, is preparing work for build and becoming very frustrated with the process of moving requirements from one tool to the next while maintaining traceability.
A current state journey map in which our persona is facing several challenges as she attempts to accomplish her goals.
Current State Lifecycle
Mapping current state goals and pain points next to tools leveraged throughout a typical Salesforce implementation project illustrated how several key pain points were related to constant transitions from one tool to another. This highlighted the need for a seamless end to end project experience, not just for the project team, but for project stakeholders as well.
A current state project life cycle map which provides a high level overview of needs and challenges faced by our personas throughout a typical project.
Problem Statement
To ensure our team’s efforts remained focused on the right challenges, we wrote this succint problem statement:
Our users are being slowed down by the myriad of tools they must use in order to deliver a Salesforce implementation. Project information is fractured, communications disjointed, traceability difficult and standardization across projects a constant battle. Project teams need one place to keep projects on track, maintain alignment around a single source of truth and simplify the experience for their stakeholders.
Competitor Analysis
We identified both direct and indirect competitors and analyzed how they were approaching the same problems we were trying to solve. This validated our view that tailoring the Enable experience to Salesforce implementations and suggesting IP would be major differentiators for our product.
A graph which shows the amount of positive and negative sentiment on various direct and indirect competitors voiced during user interviews.
A screenshot of a Rally, considered a direct competitor.
A screenshot of a Asana, considered a direct competitor.
MVP Experience Map
Since our product had to be a highly collaborative tool, I created this project life cycle experience map to zero in on the goals, actions and thoughts of each of our personas throughout a hypothetical project. This gave us a comprehensive overview of how the product would bind each of these experiences together and serve as a single source of truth throughout a project. This also helped define the boundaries of our minimum viable product (MVP) and better understand where our personas’ experiences with the platform would begin and end.
An experience map which illustrates how various personas interact with the system and each other throughout a project.
Sitemap
As I began designing the MVP, I created several sitemaps to illustrate how particular elements of the solution would relate to one another and define high level information architecture.
A high level sitemap which shows each of the key pages included in the MVP.
Team Exercises
As we began exploring more specific features, I ran several design exercises which gave the entire team the opportunity to work together to generate and refine ideas. This brought developers, project managers and quality analysts into the design process early and ensured alignment on feasibility before getting too far into the design process.
A set of sketches produced during a design exercise.
Wireframes
Focusing on key pages and features, initial wireframes included only as much detail as was necessary to visualize the approach and communicate or test an idea. The primary goal was to prototype our ideas, test with end users and refine until we had a design we were comfortable moving forward with into hifi design and build.
Homepage
Work items hierarchy view
Work items kanban view
Work items kanban modal
Team management
Solution library
High Fidelity Prototype
The high fidelity prototype for the product was on built on Adobe XD over several sprints with developers working on designed features while other feature designs were still in progress. This allowed us to iterate on designs and continually incorporate user feedback into the process.
The project dashboard provides a birds eye view of general project health, progress and workload.
The hierarchy split screen gives users the flexibility to browse and update many records rapidly. Features like drag and drop, bulk update, quick create, nesting, quick filters and saved views make the completion of these daily tasks quick and efficient. This component is used throughout the platform to display various different objects inhierarchical relationships.
The project navigation expands on hover and can be pinned in the expanded state.
Another example of the hierarchy split screen component, this time displaying testing related records like test cases and results.
This powerful kanban board gives teams a collaborative space to understand workload and progress while providing individuals an effective visual way to organize and update their work.
Features like quick filtering, saved views and expanding stages provide considerable flexibility to produce the view that is most useful to any given user.
The record detail page allows users to focus on a single record at a time.
Team management settings allow project owners with the correct permissions to add and remove users or adjust their project permissions.
Design System
We leveraged the Salesforce Lightning Design System (SLDS) as our design language. Below are just a few examples of the many component blueprints that I designed leveraging base SLDS components and styles to ensure easy implementation for the development team.
Project navigation component blueprints
Kanban card component blueprint
Quick filter component blueprint
Primary navigation component blueprints
Outcomes
Since it’s soft launch in Spring ‘20, Enable has been leveraged by organizations of all sizes to manage hundreds of projects. Traction on Demand, the 1200+ employee consulting firm which spawned the platform, uses it exclusively for all internal and client projects. Feedback from users has been very positive and the product team has grown considerably as adoption increases rapidly. The team continues to incorporate user feedback, develop new features and shape the roadmap.