Salesforce

During the summer of 2023, I was the first ever content design intern at Salesforce (read more about my experience here). I worked on Salesforce Starter, which helps customers accelerate growth by bringing sales, service, and marketing together into a single, lightweight suite.

SKILLS

Content design, Copywriting, User research, Competitive research, UX/UI design, CMS tooling

TIMELINE

May 2023 - Aug 2023

ROLE

UX Content Design Intern

Overview

During my time at Salesforce, I led multiple initiatives, including delivering content for Starter’s home page and onboarding flow, researching competitors, conducting user tests, and building an internal research organization framework.

As I became more knowledgeable about the product, I found that there were unaddressed gaps in Starter’s onboarding experience. With the support of my team, I initiated additional research in this area.

This case study will focus on my redesign of the Starter onboarding experience as a result of my findings.

Background

Spotlight is a collapsible panel on the home page that displays three suggestion cards at a time.

Spotlight is intended to be the main source of onboarding for users.

It’s a passive form of onboarding, as it only provides value if a user actively decides to click on it.

  • Spotlight is the first point of contact with potential customers. The target users for Starter are SMBs looking for a fast and easy CRM solution in order to keep their businesses running.

    Spotlight sets the tone for whether a user will continue to use Salesforce or not.

  • After running 13 user tests on Spotlight, I realized that only 3 (23%) of them actually interacted with the panel. This was surprising, since Spotlight was supposed to be a guiding light for users.

    Additionally, leadership expressed a goal for higher user retention. Data insights outlined that the more a user interacted with Starter, the more likely they would be to convert.

  • Business How might we drive user retention by improving the onboarding experience?

    User Experience How might we help users learn to use Starter faster so they can immediately gain value from it?

    Technical —How might we reach these goals in a way that is time-efficient and feasible for engineering?

Analyzing the current experience

[01] A new user will see this home screen upon entering Starter. In user tests, most scrolled past Spotlight to look at the rest of the panels.

[02] Users can click on the Spotlight cards, which either lead to learning walkthroughs or action items.

[03] Imagine you clicked on the “Import your contacts” card. A walkthrough like this one would guide you through the process of adding a contact.

Researching competitors

I looked into a variety of companies in the CRM + SaaS space to see what their onboarding process was like.

[04] Hubspot greets users with an 11-step demo, complete with sample data.

[05] Dynamics 365 provides users a checklist of onboarding items, along with fully interactive sample data.

[06] Using three cards on the home page, Dropbox prompts users to upload files, install on desktop, and use the mobile app.

Improvements

I applied visual and structural treatments to increase Spotlight’s visibility. This included creating an onboarding demo of Spotlight, walking users through the first three cards.

To decrease engineering load, I used familiar components and walkthroughs that can be created declaratively (through the UI).

[07] As the most useful part of onboarding, Spotlight deserved to have more attention called to it.

[08] Our data shows that users who import their contacts are more likely to convert. Therefore, I pushed this step to the top of the onboarding priorities. Additionally, competitors with sample data were easier to use, so I incorporated a sample data option into the onboarding demo.

Final onboarding flow

I passed off this high level flow to the team. It encouraged further investment in this area and inspired the team as they moved towards improving the onboarding experience.

Learnings

This project was born out of pure curiosity near the end of my internship. I pulled together everything I had learned over the summer to tackle a problem that our team needed additional insights on. Many of these skills included competitive research, copywriting, UX/UI design, and user research.

Thank you

I am beyond grateful to my team for giving me the flexibility to pursue this passion project. Amidst 8 other projects throughout the summer, I proposed this idea after observing the conversations around Starter’s onboarding process. My team welcomed my ideas and encouraged my curiosity. Huge shoutout to Nicole McGovern, Lori Sanders, Fiona Moriarty, and Frances Baum for your unwavering support!