Introduction
Everyday, teams are building solutions for end users to complete their jobs with less complexity and more ease of use. We created Unmet because we felt there was a gap in the market on how product teams can use modern approaches to creating loved Salesforce solutions.
Our core belief is Salesforce can be a great business application platform, and provide users with great experiences to complete their work and drive business goals.
Here is how we design our Salesforce solutions using User-First Design Principles.
What are User-First Design Principles?
User-first design principles focus on needs, preferences, and behaviors of the end user throughout the design & solutioning & feedback process. It’s about creating interfaces and experiences that are intuitive, enjoyable, and tailored to the user’s expectations. This approach gauges the products success on how intuitive the product is to use, and their satisfaction is the backbone of all design decisions
- Empathy First: The most important principle of user first design is empathy. By putting yourself in the end user shoes, you are able to understand their experiences and motivations and help align with their goals. The goal is to create interfaces that resonate with the users on an emotional level, leading to an engaging experience.
- Seamless Navigation and Intuitive Design: A user should be able to navigate the application without a lot of training or guidance. Consistent design and UI patterns allow for the users to learn and then adapt to where they can find what they are looking for across the entire application.
- Accessibility: Users come in all shapes and sizes, which means that product teams need to account for any and all possible accessibility areas that might arise as part of the design. The design needs to go beyond focus on the largest group of users, but should consider those users with diverse needs, including those with disabilities.
- Continuous User Feedback and Iteration: they say change is constant and that is particularly true of what users require, prefer and need as part of their applications. Constant feedback & user analytics are important areas for product teams to consider when evolving an application over time. The feedback allows for adjustments and refinements that continue to cater to your user bases’ evolving needs.
How Does Unmet Use User-First Design Principles in Our Salesforce Projects
The Unmet team uses empathy-first discovery with our core business users to guide the creation of a visual prototype. Our discovery phase of projects consists of sessions with the business users to understand the current processes and then goes a level deeper. What are your current frustrations? What information do you need to do you job well? We ask these deeper questions to get a better understanding of our business users so that our designed prototype can address those concerns.
The visual prototype we create allows for a clickable walk through of how the app will be designed. This allows business users to see a “lifelike replica” of what the development team will build. We are able to gather valuable data around the look and feel of the application. In regular Salesforce projects, this step happens as well, just much later in the process, and therefore creates a lot more rework. By using a prototype during the design and business requirement phase, we can eliminate the risk of “what will it look like” and “what am I signing off on” and give our clients more trust in what we will build for them.
As Salesforce partners, we leverage Salesforce’s research and design principles that have a focus on accessibility. Salesforce’s accessibility efforts not only build trust through creating products that conform to accepted technical standards like WCAG standards and Section 508, but they enable customer success by creating products that fit more user needs and benefit everyone.
How It Helps Our Clients
Our clients have expressed how great it is to be able to work with and see a prototype during the design & requirements gathering phase of the project. Gone are the days of asking our clients to sign off on process maps & unlinked user stories that give little understanding to clients on how the application will meet their needs.
By using the Unmet prototype approach, we create successful Salesforce projects and look forward to providing similar experience for more clients in the future.
Want to Work With Us?
Amanda Perkins currently works as Director of Customer Success at Unmet. Amanda is 9x Salesforce certified and has worked across industries and size of companies to create Salesforce solutions that improve the way that business operate.
