User Experience Blog
User Experience Blog
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Team Members Hosting the North Bay Agile August meeting
Aug 17, 2009Come to the August meeting of the North Bay Agile Group, being hosted at the Salesforce.com Headquarters on August 25th in downtown San Francisco!
Peter Roessler and Anshu Agarwal, researchers from Salesforce.com, will be sharing with us some of their ongoing work addressing issues user experience practitioners confront in an AGILE development environment.
You’ll review and discuss their core set of issues and how they got there and also respond to them, both individually and as a group, during an interactive exercise. Come share your war stories and contribute to the creation of some suggested best practices for incorporating User Experience efforts into an AGILE environment and take some ideas back home!
RSVP here: http://www.meetup.com/NorthBayAgile/calendar/11098264/ -
User Feedback Matters: How Our Users Improved Connect for Outlook
Aug 13, 2009User feedback is a huge part of our process here at salesforce.com. We rely on our users’ input every day to help us improve our features. Today, we’d like to kick off a new tradition in the User Experience blog, where we highlight the impact our users have had on the design of Salesforce. In this first post, we’d like to tell you about Connect for Outlook’s functionality for associating Contacts (included in the Winter ‘09 release). The original user interface (UI) required a lot of steps and didn’t help the user prevent or recover from errors (See image below).
Usability testing helped us create an easier to understand, more user-friendly solution. We used an iterative process and conducted 2 rounds of usability testing (with both admins and sales users) to help improve this experience. User feedback was crucial in helping us improve the UI, starting with an initial design (see #1) and resulting in the final design (see #3).
One of the most challenging design issues was how to clearly communicate to users what Contact information was coming from Outlook and syncing to Salesforce. We made many changes to the dialog to help convey this information. Refer to the letters in the image above to help identify changes.
Banner and Icon Changes:
- (A) The salesforce-like visual styling of the banner (see #1) was misleading since the contact was coming from Outlook, not Salesforce. Version #2 restyled this banner, and the final Version #3 incorporated the Name/Company/Manager information as part of the Outlook contact information. These changes helped users better understand the flow of information between the two systems.
- “What am I associating here again? I thought the contact hadn’t been added to Salesforce yet, but the big purple banner makes me think the opposite… I’m confused.” – Anonymous
- (B) Salesforce.com icons were also included in the Status section to visually show that Contacts were being associated to Salesforce.
Other Key Changes:
- (C) Change from dropdown for Association Type to Tabs
- (D) Help text added
- (E) Associate button label changed to ‘OK’
- (F) Quick Create button placed next to SearchAfter multiple iterations, our final design (#3) tested extremely well with users in lab. This was just the start - more exciting changes coming soon to Outlook integration!
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.
- “What am I associating here again? I thought the contact hadn’t been added to Salesforce yet, but the big purple banner makes me think the opposite… I’m confused.” – Anonymous
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San Diego Bound: Team presents at HCII 2009
Jul 16, 2009Two members of the User Experience team are heading to San Diego to present at HCI International 2009 next week. Melissa Federoff will be offering tips and tricks for achieving user centered design in agile environments while Madhu Prabaker will share new innovations for measuring intuitiveness and overall emotional impact of design. If you happen to be attending this event, please say hello to Madhu or Melissa.
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Salesforce Browser Support and Configuration Doc
Mar 18, 2009We recently released a new document listing the official browsers that Salesforce supports. As noted previously in the User Experience blog, Internet Explorer 6.0 is still supported, but we recommend Firefox 3.0 for the best performance. If you want to continue using IE, we strongly recommend that you upgrade to IE 7.0 and apply all Microsoft® hotfixes. IE 7.0 is faster, more reliable, and better supported than IE 6.0. Salesforce also supports Safari 3 for both Mac and Windows platforms.
The new Browser Support and Configuration tip sheet also includes configuration recommendations to maximize browser performance for both Firefox and IE.
As new browsers and versions are supported, we'll update the Browser Support and Configuration tip sheet with all the details.
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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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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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Google Docs and the Collaborative Power of the Cloud
Jan 20, 2009More powerful than a PowerPoint. Able to unite multi-disciplinary teams in a single environment. It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's Google Presentations!
At Salesforce we're obviously big fans of cloud computing so it should come as no surprise that we're also big fans of Google Docs, the online office productivity suite from Google. Introduced into our work environment late last year, Google Docs has rapidly supplanted Microsoft Office as the solution of choice for office documents. Since its arrival it has been unclogging inboxes and facilitating collaboration across the organization. To demonstrate the power of Google Docs, let's imagine a fairly typical office document scenario: You're working on a big presentation for the executives. There are multiple contributors and each person is assigned a portion of slides in a large slide deck. One "lucky" person is elected to merge all of the slides together. As the project progresses, managing the edits and the merge process soon consume a huge percentage of the team's time as they email multi-megabyte files back and forth.
Recently, the Salesforce User Experience team was faced with the prospect of just such a scenario. We began a large collaborative design effort to create an extensive set of "paper" prototypes. When all was said and done over 200 slides were produced by 6 primary contributors (and at times we had up to 10 contributors). Using traditional software this multi-contributor document would have been a recipe for disaster but, thanks to Google Presentations, we had the power of cloud computing on our side. With a Google Presentation all contributors were able to edit a single document online at the same time. No merging of slides. No emailing multi-megabyte files back and forth. One central location to collaborate, contribute, share and capture feedback in real time. We were even able to allow multiple key stakeholders to view the document while it was being edited by multiple contributors, providing an unprecedented level of transparency and collaboration.
Through the course of the project we put some extreme demands on Google Presentations and it performed well beyond our expectations. Thanks to Google Docs and cloud computing we were able to spend more time innovating and less time wrestling with technology and logistics. Hooray for the cloud!
Do you have a success story you'd like to share? We'd love to hear it! How is your company leveraging the power of Salesforce in combination with other cloud services?
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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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