User Experience Blog
User Experience Blog - Interaction Design
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Graphical Approval Process Editor - Part 1: How do our customers work with and think about approval processes?
Nov 6, 2009
For a long time we've understood that creating approval processes was often a tedious and complicated endeavor. For example, it took 5 steps to define a process, 3 steps to define an approver, and numerous clicks to add workflow actions. Furthermore, the detail page layout (shown left in the graphic above) made it difficult to troubleshoot, find process elements, or understand the flow of the process. The first thing we did after we decided to redesign this feature was talk to our users to better understand how they would ideally like to create approval processes.In one of our earliest activities, we asked a group of salesforce administrators to construct a hypothetical approval process using either a text-based or graphic-based tool. Not surprisingly, we learned that diagrams played a huge role in conceptualizing, planning, and communicating approval processes. We also discovered that it was quite common for a salesforce.com administrator to be given a diagram of the process they were asked to implement, which they had to then translate into our largely text and form-based interface. On the flip side we found that some administrators were asked to create a diagram of the process they just implemented in order to make it accessible to others. Clearly, we had a great opportunity to make these tasks easier by allowing administrators to graphically construct, visualize, and export their process for communication purposes.
Taking the Middle Road
One thing we noticed in our early activities was that our users varied on whether they felt more comfortable creating approval processes in a linear fashion (e.g. fleshing out the details for each approval step before moving on) or in a top-down manner (e.g. first specifying the number of steps, then setting the approvers, then adding actions, etc). For this reason, we decided that an early requirement for the design would be to let users quickly and successfully construct their processes in either style. Another early investigation was how strongly we should adhere to Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). BPMN is a specification for modeling business processes that provides standards for how to represent process elements graphically. In our early usability testing, we found that although some of our users are familiar with this notation, the majority of our users were confused by some of the more specific graphical conventions. For this reason, we chose to adhere to the more common graphical representations like Events (circles), Activities (expandable/collapsable boxes), and Gateways (diamonds), but not to introduce more complex elements like Swimlanes.
From Concept to Implementation
Although we had done enough early investigations to achieve a more complete view of the existing editor's shortcomings and how our users preferred to work, we still had a long road to travel. We needed to test and validate our design direction, figure out what technology can be used to support the functionality our users wanted, and plan how to appropriately split this feature across multiple-releases. In Parts 2 and 3, David and I will talk about some of the designs we considered, obstacles we faced, and insights we gained while creating the Summer '09 read-only Graphical Approval Process Visualizer and the upcoming fully-featured Graphical Approval Process Editor. -
IxDA Redux this weekend in San Francisco
Mar 12, 2009Earlier last month, 460 interaction designers converged in Vancouver to discuss, debate, and share a spectrum of topics that are important to our community of practice. The Interaction09 conference featured three days of tactical workshops, smart sessions filled with practical advice, and a fantastic collection of inspirational keynotes.
Many of the contributors to the event came from the Bay Area so the local IxDA group is hosting a redux of the conference featuring several of the local speakers. If you'd like to attend here are the details:
Time: March 14, 2009 from 12pm to 5pm
Location: Adaptive Path
Street: 363 Brannan Street
City: San FranciscoI was honored to be selected this year to speak at both the full conference and the redux. My presentation was called Postcard Patterns: An Agile UI Pattern Creation Process and focuses on using Agile methods to improve documentation efficiency, efficacy and productivity.
There are a number of speakers contributing at the half-day event and it promises to be a fun and informative event. If you're interested in attending, the details can be found at the IxDA-SF site
If you'd like to read more about the parent organization visit their site.
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Do you use a screen reader with Salesforce? We would like to talk to you!
Aug 20, 2008Do you know someone who accesses Salesforce using JAWS, Window-Eyes, or other screen reader software? Are you such a person? The User Experience team seeks to connect with individuals who use screen reader software to interact with Salesforce. We are interested in gathering more first-hand knowledge about what makes the experience of using Salesforce with assistive technology (AT) as productive and enjoyable as it can be.
We would like to schedule in-person observations and interviews with qualified participants to see and hear about what's working well and what we can improve. Each participant will receive a gift certificate in appreciation of their time.
If you or someone you know would like to be contacted, send a note to tester@salesforce.com.
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Agile2008 Conference Recap - Postcard Patterns
Aug 19, 2008Last week, while Craig was in Aspen, Jason Winters, myself, and over a dozen Salesforce.com colleagues were in Toronto, Canada at the Agile2008 Conference. Jason and I were there to present some of our process innovations around the agile, and rapid, production of an interaction design Pattern Library. Don't know what we mean by "Pattern Library"? To quote wikipedia:
"In interaction design/HCI, an interaction design (ID) pattern is a general repeatable solution to a commonly-occurring usability or accessibility problem in interface design or interaction design."
Essentially, a library is a collection of documents designed to help you create usable and consistent software.
Our session was titled "Postcard Patterns: An Agile Pattern Creation Process". Traditionally, creating and maintaining a pattern library has been a daunting task requiring extensive resources and, sometimes, dedicated full-time employees.
In keeping with our development team’s agile transformation we revisited the process and invented Postcard Patterns – simple, visual documents that allow us to effectively drive consensus across teams with a lean communication tool. In contrast to our previous pace of 2 patterns in six months, we recently produced 43 patterns in less than three months.Here's an example of one of our patterns.
For the session, we had a fantastic group of 25 attendees who made the session entertaining, enlightening and educational. The main thing we learned? Most User Experience teams, when taking on the challenge of documenting their interaction design patterns, encounter the same problems we did.
If you'd like to see our presentation, or those from my Salesforce.com colleagues and the rest of the Agile conference, check out slideshare.
Do you have any experience creating an interface design pattern library? Have any tips you'd like to share? Let us know!
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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 -
Did you miss the CHI 2008 conference? Would you like to see and hear this year's conference highlights?
May 22, 2008The Salesforce.com User Experience Team is hosting an all day event which will highlight some of the top presentations and papers from this year's CHI conference. For more information on this event and to register: http://www.chirecap2008.com/
The CHI conference is hosted yearly by ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction. For more information about ACM SIGCHI and the field of Computer-Human Interaction visit: http://www.sigchi.org/
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The Salesforce.com User Experience Team is Hiring
Feb 5, 2008Salesforce.com is currently looking for outstanding UI Developers and Senior UI Designers to join our world-class team of of User Experience professionals.
Check out the Careers section of our web site for a complete list of current job openings at salesforce.com.
Share and Enjoy,
Jerry Sherman
Salesforce.com User Experience -
Salesforce to Present at CHI '08, the Premiere Conference for User Experience Professionals
Feb 4, 2008Three members of the salesforce.com User Experience team are traveling to Florence this April to participate in the following events at CHI '08:
Panel: Longitudinal Usability Data Collection: Art versus Science?
Catherine Courage (Director of User Experience) will be participating in a panel on longitudinal usability data collection. Collecting usability data over time is increasingly becoming best practice in industry, but lacks “thought leadership” in the current literature – very few articles or books exist addressing the topic. To inspire academic research and share best practices with practitioners, Catherine will be participating in a panel with other industry and academic researchers to understand and debate some key questions on this topic.
Panel: Extreme Usability: Adapting Research Approaches for Agile Development
Melissa Federoff (Senior Usability Analyst) and Craig Villamor (Platform Design Manager) will be leading a panel of researchers in a discussion about adapting usability methods to fit within Agile software development processes. Salesforce.com moved to using Scrum (a form of Agile development) over a year ago. Since changing to this model, the company has seen more frequent and predictable releases. However, since our release cycles are much shorter, there is often less time to do upfront user research or usability testing on our designs during product development. We created this panel of practitioners to discuss these challenges in a public forum and share strategies with our peers in the User Experience field.
Workshop: Optimizing Agile User-Centered Design
Catherine and Melissa will be participating in a full-day workshop to improve future Agile user‑centered design (UCD) experiences for User Experience practitioners. To achieve this, senior practitioners with prior experience on Agile projects will share their knowledge and experiences in order to:
- Identify success factors for Agile UCD
- Find and remove obstacles that block Agile UCD
- Find opportunities that Agile projects give us
- Identify best UX practices for Agile UCD
- Identify UX skills that Agile projects need
The results of this investigation will be shared with the wider User Experience community. -
Search Filters
Oct 12, 2007We recently introduced a new feature, search filters, to the search results page. Search filters allow you to narrow your search results by specifying criteria.
You can use search filters to:
- Narrow your search results by specifying values for all searchable fields as well as fields that are not currently searchable, such as Parent Account on the Account object.
- Specify multiple values in a filter field to narrow search results to records that match any of the criteria (OR search).
- Specify values across filter fields to narrow search results to records that match all of the criteria (AND search).
- Collapse and expand search filters inline based on your personal preference. When you return to the search results page, the filters remain in the state in which you left them.
Enabling search filters is easy. An administrator just has to navigate to a search results page and select Customize... >> Filters For All Users from the top of any search results section.
The filter fields that are available are the same as those that are specified in the Search Layouts areas of Setup.
If you have any feedback about your experience with search filters, please leave a comment!
Also, if you are interested in the latest search features, keep your eyes open for an upcoming post on our new design for lookups (which will include these nifty filters)! We look forward to hearing your feedback.
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Meet the User Experience Team at Dreamforce
Sep 14, 2007If you are coming to Dreamforce '07 (you can still register if you haven't already--it's Moscone Center, there's tons of room!), be sure to stop by and meet the User Experience team.
When you get a chance, head on over to the Campground, where we'll be demoing
- new features planned for release in Winter '08
- interactive prototypes of features we're working on for future release
- a few next-generation UI ideas we'd love to run by you
We'll also be doing usability testing at Dreamforce. Unfortunately most of the tester slots are already taken. But if you're interested in a deep dive into Forecasting, email tester@salesforce.com and we'll try and get you on the list.
Come by anytime -- we'll have team members available every day of the conference for demos and discussion.
See you there!
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