User Experience Blog
User Experience Blog - Next Generation UI
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User Feedback Matters: How our users inspired the design of Data Categories
Nov 11, 2009In this second post in the series, User Feedback Matters (see our first post), we will tell you about how customer feedback impacted a brand new Salesforce feature, Data Categories.
Last year, Salesforce acquired an on-premise Knowledge Management application and tasked several product teams with its redesign and implementation on the Salesforce platform. A key part of the existing Knowledge Management application was the ability to create data category hierarchies that allow administrators to classify knowledge articles and help users find the specific records they are looking for. The Data Categories team was created with the goal of redesigning and moving this functionality onto our platform.
Step 1: Understanding the Needs of Knowledge Managers
We conducted multiple interviews with our existing Knowledge Management customers to understand how they used the existing application and to learn what they liked and disliked about it. They mentioned that managing categories in the current application required too many clicks and that the hierarchy of data categories was not as clearly represented as they would like.Step 2: Customer Evaluation
We iterated on several design concepts based on feedback from our customer interviews until we arrived at a promising design. This design included some new interaction and layout patterns that would need more validation. To validate our designs, we conducted 2 rounds of usability sessions [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usability_test]. The sessions included administrators of the current Knowledge Management application as well as Salesforce administrators who hadn't used the Knowledge Management product. The first session focused on validating the overall design concept and the second session focused on more detailed interactions in the design. You can see the results below.
What We Tested 1st Round What We Did 2nd Round What We Did Two-pane layout and hierarchy structure Users found this intuitive Terminology It wasn't clear that "Category Type" meant a container for categories Changed "Category Type" to "Category Group" The new label was clear to users Deleting categories Users misinterpreted the messaging and assumed they were deleting both the category and the records associated with it Adjusted the message to more clearly indicate that records wouldn't be deleted but would be moved to the parent category Users now understood the message but wanted more control over where the records would be moved to Added another step after the delete confirmation giving users different options to re-categorize the records Drag and Drop Drag and drop functionality was not discoverable Added visual aid to highlight drag and drop capability It wasn't clear to users where in the hierarchy they were dragging and dropping a category Revised drag and drop target indicator to highlight the exact location that the category is being moved to Keyboard Shortcuts Users found keyboard shortcuts easy to use Users had difficulty discovering the tips for keyboard shortcuts
Added visual aid to emphasize tips
Based on the feedback from round 2, it looked like the new design was a success:
I think [my staff] would be very pleasantly surprised by this. I think it would make their jobs a lot more efficient.” – Anonymous
Watch the video below to see the final design!
Stay tuned for more stories about how you’ve impacted the user experience of Salesforce!
Would you like to get involved in our user experience program to help improve salesforce.com? Fill out this quick survey or email us at tester@salesforce.com.
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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. -
Video tutorial for the Enhanced Page Layout Editor
Feb 2, 2009With the Spring '09 Release, we created a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) version of the page layout editor. Administrators can quickly customize page layouts with an improved drag-and-drop design, Quick Find, Undo/Redo, the ability to save a copy of a layout, or switch to another layout directly from the editor. The enhanced page layout editor includes functionality for creating blank spaces!
To help our users learn how to use the new editor, we also created a video tutorial. Look for more of these video tutorials in upcoming new features.
We’d love to get your comments on our enhanced page layout editor!
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Salesforce and Internet Explorer 6, Part II
Jan 31, 2009It's been a while since we've posted about browser usage, specifically regarding Internet Explorer 6.
Well, IE 6 - and Internet Explorer in general - have been in the news a bit lately. First, Internet Explorer overall is losing browser market share. There are now several great alternative browsers available. Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Google Chrome are all excellent options that are being pursued by other customers and web users in general. In the last four years, IE's market share has dropped from over 90% to 68%, with the rate of decline accelerating each year due to the introduction of these excellent alternatives.
Second, Google (with their Gmail application), Facebook, and a host of other Web applications have either dropped official support for, or did not release any new features supported in, IE6 in the last year. These recommendations reflect what we at salesforce.com are seeing as well: as a "last generation" browser that will be 8 years old in a few months, IE 6 has fallen far behind other browsers with regard to speed, stability, and security. Of the browsers we support, IE 6 provides the worst user experience for our users on all of these fronts.
At this point, we want to urge all users who are still using IE 6 to consider one of the following changes (in ranked order):
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Option 1: If you have the necessary permissions on your computer, install and use a browser other than Internet Explorer
Salesforce officially supports Mozilla Firefox 3.0.x and Apple Safari 3.x. And while not officially supported, Google Chrome 1.0 seems to work extremely well with our service. All of these browsers are much more standards compliant than Internet Explorer, all are much quicker, and new releases of these browsers - overall - have historically had minimal issues.
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Option 2: If you have the necessary permissions, but you don't want to give up on IE, upgrade to Internet Explorer 7
IE 7 is faster, more reliable, and better supported by Microsoft than IE 6.
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Option 3: If you don't have any control over the
programs installed on your computer, talk with your IT department about
switching to a different browser
We know we have a wide variety of customers - everything from 3-person companies in a garage to multi-national corporations - and understand that many of you have no choice in which browser you use at work. Start engaging the appropriate people in your company now to improve your user experience with Web-based applications.
Please note that we still fully support IE 6 for the features we have today, and will continue to support it through 2009; we will give ample notice to all of our customers before we pursue officially de-supporting IE 6. However, as we release more functionality and features this year, you will begin to see new UI enhancements that will not be fully supported on IE 6.
We want our users to have the fastest, most reliable experience possible every day, and transitioning from IE 6 to a faster and better supported browser - as soon as possible - is a great way to ensure that.
Share and Enjoy.
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Option 1: If you have the necessary permissions on your computer, install and use a browser other than Internet Explorer
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Enterprise UI Summit Recap
Aug 12, 2008
Last week I had the good fortune of participating in a series of thought-provoking discussions at the Enterprise UI Summit in Aspen, Colorado.
The event was hosted by Jive Software and attendees included user experience experts from companies like SAP, Google, Adobe and RIM. The group shared design challenges, best practices, and visions for the future of enterprise software with an emphasis on the influence of the consumer Web and social software. Agenda items included:
- Show and Tell: Design Challenges, Process and Inspiration
- Microsharing in the Enterprise
- User Profiles: Best Practices from the Consumer Web
- Panel: Making Enterprise User Experience BetterTwitter was a surprisingly hot topic at the summit. Many attendees discussed how they have used Twitter to improve communication in personal and enterprise settings and the group debated the potential benefits and pitfalls of introducing these kinds of communication tools within a corporate environment. Personal (employee) profiles was another hot topic. In particular, the group discussed the questions of data portability, ownership of content, and integration with consumer sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn.
Many thanks to the friendly folks at Jive Software for hosting such a terrific event!
p.s. Get my take on enterprise software UI in this Enterprise UI Summit attendee profile.
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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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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. -
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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Sneak Peek: Inline Editing
Jul 26, 2007When looking at a record in Salesforce, have you ever thought to yourself, "Why isn't there an easy way to just edit one or two fields quickly, without clicking the Edit button?" Well, wonder no more. We just completed our first full round of usability testing on a new feature being developed - Inline Editing - and so far, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. See the screenshot below for a quick look.
We received some great feedback from usability participants last week, but I'm interested in getting even more ideas and suggestions. While I can't promise that every suggestion will be implemented, I can promise that each one will be reviewed thoroughly to give you the best product possible.
So, if you have a spare moment, check out the prototype here, kick the tires a bit, and tell me what you think by posting a comment below. Cheers everyone - Eric
P.S. It's a prototype, so it's not perfect (for example, you should use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer, the multi-select picklist is....um....temperamental, etc.), but hopefully you can get a good feel for the behaviour clicking around the page. For starters, check out...
- Easy-to-Understand Editability Indicators - simply hover over a field's value to see whether it's editable. Editable fields change color and display a pencil, uneditable fields simply display a lock.
- Single-Click-to-Edit - clicking once (not double-clicking) on a field's value will turn on "edit mode" for that field. Click off the field, and it will automatically confirm your change (if a change was actually made to the value in the field).
- Text Auto-Select - for text and textarea fields, clicking on the field to edit it will automatically select the text for you, so you don't need to highlight it yourself. Just click once and start typing your new value.
- Single Undo - unlike other inline edit features on the market, Salesforce's implementation gives you the ability to undo a single change without canceling every change on the page. If you edit three fields, then change your mind about one, simply click the "undo" icon for the field you want to revert, then click Save (or press Enter) to commit the other two changes.
- Key Stroke Detection - pressing either the Enter or Esc key when you're in an editable field will either confirm or cancel that single change, respectively. Pressing Enter or Esc when you're not in an editable field will commit or cancel all your changes, respectively. So, if you just want to edit a single field and save the change, click the field, make your edit, then press Enter twice (once to confirm the single change, then again to save the entire record).
- Dependent Picklist Presentation - all field dependencies are shown as a group in an overlay, so even if you have dependent picklists that are separated on the page, they'll show up together whenever you try to edit one. (Click either the "Industry" or "Type" fields to see what I mean.)
- Click-Away Detection - changing a value and then trying to click a hyperlink on the page to navigate away from it displays a warning that you've made changes that haven't been saved. (Note in the prototype, it only works for the links in the detail area of the page, but would normally be everywhere.)
- Compound Fields - fields that display one way on the detail page, and another on the edit page (such as addresses, first and last names, and multi-select picklists) will show as an overlay in the middle of the window in edit mode. When changes are made, only the changed portions of the concatenated fields will display as changed. Go ahead and try it by changing only one portion of an address field.
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