User Experience Blog
User Experience Blog - June 2008
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Salesforce.com User Experience Team to Present at Agile 2008 Conference
Jun 30, 2008
If you’re heading to the Agile 2008 conference being held in Toronto from August 4th to the 8th, look for members of the salesforce.com User Experience team. We’ll be sharing our thoughts on Agile software development from our unique perspectives as interface designers and usability analysts.
Be sure to check out these sessions:
- Postcard Patterns: An Agile Pattern Creation Process
Presented by Ian Swinson and Jason Winters
- The Doctor is "In" - Using the Office Hours Concept to Make Limited Resources Most Effective
Presented by Andrea Leszek and Catherine Courage
- The UX Graffiti Wall
Presented by Peter Roessler and Anshu Agarwal
About Agile 2008
Agile 2008 Conference, Toronto, August 4 to 8, 2008
http://www.agile2008.org/About the salesforce.com User Experience Team
Usability is of utmost importance to salesforce.com. The User Experience team at salesforce.com is responsible for making sure that our features are easy to use, understand, and learn. We rely on the expert knowledge of our team of usability analysts, user interface designers, and graphic designers to accomplish these goals.
Are you a user experience professional?
We’re hiring UI Designers, Usability Analysts and Visual DesignersGoing to any interesting conferences?
Let us know about them.Want to learn more about salesforce.com’s design and usability processes?
Post a question and keep an eye on the User Experience Blog for more news and information.
Subscribe to the User Experience Blog
- Postcard Patterns: An Agile Pattern Creation Process
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Salesforce and Internet Explorer 6
Jun 17, 2008Today's release of Firefox 3 seemed like a good time to re-raise the issue of browser support and Salesforce.
Back in August 2007, I posted about Salesforce browser usage. At that time, Internet Explorer 6.0 usage represented about 65% of total browser logins, or just about 2 of every 3 users.
Since August, we’ve seen browser usage of our service change fairly dramatically.
You can see that IE7 usage has grown to around one-third of all users. And Firefox 2.0 usage has increased dramatically, to 14% of all users.
You can also see that IE6 usage has dropped a fair amount as users have upgraded or switched browsers. But more than half of all users still use IE6 when accessing Salesforce.
Why do we pay attention to browser usage? One reason is that recently we embarked on efforts to build the next-generation UI of Salesforce, which will include using JavaScript and other technologies that are, frankly, a challenge for IE6 to handle.
In addition to working on next-generation UI, we frequently wrestle with random, difficult-to-reproduce, hard-to-fix bugs in IE6. And while we admittedly love a challenge…working around bugs in older browsers isn't really how we want to spend our time. In fact, investigating and coming up with solutions for bugs that appear only in IE6 robs us of time we would rather spend on new feature development, which is what we love doing and where we believe our customers would also prefer we focus our efforts.
Rest assured, we are not planning to de-support IE6 any time soon. IE6 is still far too heavily used by our customer base, and upgrading to IE7 or switching to another browser is too much to ask in the short-term.
However, as time goes by and more of our users upgrade to IE7 or switch to other browsers like Firefox and Safari, we move closer to the day when we will drop official support for IE6.
Another factor to consider is that Microsoft has already released a beta version of Internet Explorer 8, with a generally available release some time in the next few months (who knows?).
Given all of this, we at salesforce.com have been contemplating how we can move away from IE6 support.
Are we going to de-support IE6 in a single release? No, absolutely not.
But our current thinking is that our next-generation UI enhancements, to be released starting later this year, will not be supported on IE6.
This does not mean you could not use IE6 with Salesforce. However, it would mean that you would not have access to UI enhancements unless you upgraded to IE7 or switched to another supported browser like Firefox or Safari.
Thoughts on this post? If you use IE6, does your company have plans to upgrade its users in the coming year? Leave a comment and let us know what you think.
Share and Enjoy,
Jerry Sherman
salesforce.comP.S. With regard to Firefox 3 support: We usually target official support for major browser releases within 90 days of the initial release. Overall, we rarely see critical issues with Firefox, even from one major release to another. (I'm actually using FF3 right now to type this post and am logged into Salesforce in another tab.)
If you decide to try out Firefox 3, you will probably see some minor issues here and there--usually small cosmetic display problems. But in general it should work well with Salesforce. If you see anything more substantial, please tell us!
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Notes from CHI Recap 2008
Jun 16, 2008
About 85 members of the Bay Area community of User Experience professionals convened at Salesforce's San Mateo location last Friday to participate in an informal all-day event, CHI Recap 2008. Moderated by Salesforce Sr. Usability Analyst Melissa Federoff, the agenda featured abbreviated versions of 10 sessions and panels delivered at last April's CHI conference in Florence, Italy.
Sessions and speakers featured at CHI Recap 2008:
- Psychological Basis of UI Design Rules, Jeff Johnson, UI Wizards
- They call it "Surfing" for a Reason: Identifying Mobile Interview needs through PC deprivation, Rachel Hinman, Adaptive Path
- The Science of Fun: One-To-Many Moderated Game Research, Nate Bolt, Bolt | Peters
- Branding the Feel: Applying Standards to Enable a Uniform User Experience, Mohini Wettasinghe, SAP
- International User Research in the Product Development Cycle, Velynda Prakhantree, Oracle
- What would you do with a 1 Million Dollar UX Marketing Budget? Internal vs. External User Experience Evangelism Panel, Peter Heller, Oracle
- Longitudinal Usability Data Collection: Art versus Science?, Stephanie Rosenbaum, Tec-Ed Inc.
- Tag-it, Snag-it, or Bag-it: Combining Tags, Threads, and Folders in E-mail, John Tang, IBM
- CHI Policy Issues Around the World, Jeff Johnson, UI Wizards
- Agile and UCD, Melissa Federoff, salesforce.com
Thanks to Melissa for moderating, to all who presented, and to everyone who participated in this spectacular event. Keep an eye on the CHI Recap 2008 website... slide decks will be posted as soon as author permission is confirmed.
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Salesforce.com is Getting Software RITE
Jun 16, 2008Salesforce's User Experience Team is featured in the May/June 2008 edition of IEEE Software Magazine. The article is the by-product of a recent visit from Jeff Patton, Agile Software Development consultant, teacher and coach. Jeff recently sat down with Catherine Courage (Director of User Experience) and Craig Villamor (Manager of Platform User Interface Design) to chat about the Salesforce design and usability evaluation process.
AbstractSalesforce.com has used the RITE (Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation)method to quickly and iteratively improve its software design. RITE has helped the company retain high quality while increasing its rate of delivery using an agile development approach.
You can check out the article here:
http://csdl2.computer.org/persagen/DLAbsToc.jsp?resourcePath=/dl/mags/so/&toc=comp/mags/so/2008/03/mso03toc.xml&DOI=10.1109/MS.2008.62
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