SALESFORCE INBOX

Salesforce Inbox is a suite of mobile and desktop productivity apps that bring email, calendar, and Salesforce integration together to help sales reps sell smarter.

Salesforce Inbox aims to be an integral tool to increase the productivity and efficiency of its users. The Inbox mobile app surfaces relevant Salesforce information in your email, providing a level of context of your customer interactions. It also offers a collection of productivity tools that help take care of the daily busy work that sales reps encounter.

THE PROBLEM

There's a lot of scheduling inefficiencies with the current feature such as having to fill out too many fields before being able to select an empty time slot. How might we save time on scheduling meetings and increase engagement with making more meetings?

RESEARCH

The first stage of the research process was to empathize with the customers. This involved building an understanding of their pain points, wants, and needs.

I dove into a 3-week research sprint where I did a lot of base research such as heuristics analysis, competitive and comparative analysis, along with 5+ user interviews.

From the interviews I learned that people wanted less clutter from the existing feature, they wanted the feature to use familiar design paradigms that didn’t feel foreign or clunky. The biggest insight was that the buffer times were married to the event type to reduce the amount of fields that needed to be filled out.

DESIGN

We were on a very tight deadline and developers needed to start building soon. Our initial pondering asked if we should design mobile first. Or if we needed to separate our features into phases? Or what design language we had to comply with because this feature lived on multiple email clients like Outlook and Gmail.

Once we answered the burning questions we dove into secondary research that involved usability tests with focus groups. The focus groups consisted of solution engineers, success architects, and support agents, etc. I teamed people who don’t normally work together into breakout rooms to try different scenarios to stress-test my prototype.

From the usability tests we learned learned a couple of insights that led to simplifying the scheduling experience. For example, people wanted less clutter and more ease of use by chunking together similar ideas. The biggest discovery was how buffer times were tied to event types instead of being separate … this way it’s less things to have to fill out each time.