Brief

Salesforce Inbox, an Essentials feature for scheduling meetings, felt clunky. Despite integration within the CRM ecosystem (a key advantage), users complained about its complexity. My mission: simplify the experience.

THE TEAM AND MY ROLE

  • 1 product manager

  • 10 developers

  • 1 product designer (me)

    • Owned the entire experience, from user flow to visual design, for a new meeting scheduling solution within Salesforce Inbox. Worked within the constraints of Outlook and Gmail platforms, while also wearing the researcher and UI writer hats to ensure a consistent and user-friendly voice across all copy and UI..

METHODOLOGIES

SWOT analysis > Heuristics > Comparative & Competitive Analysis > Jobs to be Done Framework > User Flows > Extensive Market Research > Sketching > Live Prototyping > Negotiation > Product Management.

What is Salesforce Inbox?

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

What are the problems today and what are we trying to solve?

There’s a lot of scheduling inefficiencies with Salesforce Inbox

• “Couldn’t find what I was looking for”

• “UI looks like it’s from the 80s”

• “Took me a long time just to figure things out”

The goal was to increase engagement and save people time when using the product

Initial Research

Dived into a 3 week research sprint that consisted of:

SWOT and heuristics analysis

  • Explored everything that worked and didn’t work for the current product.

    • ✅ Has integrations with other email services.

    • ✅ One-stop shop with CRM.

    • ❌ Awful that the UI was messy.

    • ❌ Was too time-consuming to fill out.

    • ❌ Wasn’t a strong competitor to other solutions.

Competitive and Comparative analysis

  • Looked at other direct and indirect scheduling services and investigated a SWOT with them too

    • Calendly

    • Airbnb

    • Flight companies

    • Hubspot

    • Google Calendar

    • Outlook

  • Products like Google Calendar do a good job of housing important virtual meeting details like video-conferencing links, meeting start and end times, and overview of meeting.

  • Flight companies like do are great at displaying results for what times are available.

Additional challenges

Things were going well, we had a priority of the problem we’re trying to solve for.

Then a director presented us with more challenges. He dismissed the need for research and wanted the direction to be based on his 10 years of business instincts. He wanted to limit the feature to only finding the next 3 available time slots and introduce more customizations like adding in time duration and buffer times. He also wanted to get integrations with Outlook and Gmail done within the month.

Design process …

After doing initial research, I assembled an internal focus group made of people who interacted with Salesforce Inbox the most, or frequently talked about it. This group was consisted of: customer success agent, solution engineers, sales reps, marketing, and customer support.

I individually interviewed them on everything ranging from how end users were using the product to what kinds of experiences could be improved.

My eureka moment was …

When I got people all together into a video meeting, then did a usability session pairing people up with people that don’t normally work together. Then had them run through a breakout session with a prototype.

That’s where I learned valuable insights like how depending on the event type, you’ll always have the same buffer time and time duration. For example your virtual meetings are always going to be about 30 minutes, but your buffer time between meetings is short. Compared to your in-person meeting where your buffer time is longer to take care of things like chucking equipment into the car or traveling between buildings.

After the usability session, it was a couple of iterations of tests, redesigns, and more testing.

What people were saying

“The experience is too messy. It takes me time to fill out all the fields before I can actually send a meeting request.”

— Customer Success Agent

“If I have a video meeting, I know it'll be a short 30 minutes. I'll just need 10 minutes of break in between video meetings every time.”

— Sales Representative

Insights gathered …

From the research, surveys, usability tests, and feasibility sessions with the devs, we arrived at a working prototype that concluded with the following insights:

  1. Too many customized features can be consolidated. During the usability test, I learned that depending on the event type (in-person vs virtual), there will always be the same time duration, so that can make less things to fill out and helps do some automation like connecting a video-conference tool into a meeting.

  2. People definitely don’t like limiting the AI to look for only the next 3 available time slots. If there’s already a tool for that, people want to see what their month looks like because they have lots of clients with limited time slots.

  3. Integrations is a want, but developers need more time to solve for things. Gmail for example is a different team from the Google Integrations team and have different release cycles and different developer documentation/releases so that means making a solution is messy and dependent on 3rd party.

    • Because of the mess, it’s the smart thing to divide our goals into phases. I teamed up with the focus group and developers to gather quotes from them to persuade the director and PM to break off our goals into phases while collecting customer feedback to improve the product accordingly. This tempers the 10 years of business experience the director has with relevant wants and pain points that customers have to keep using the product instead of shoveling down what we think is best for them.

Outcome

  • Break the features into phases.

  • Move forward with the Salesforce solution first, then figure out integrations with Gmail and Outlook later.

User impact …

  • Saved people time by making less details and fields to fill out — in-app feedback

  • Increased engagement with Salesforce Inbox — in-house data analytics

  • Reduced friction with the product; simplified UI and increased efficiency — surveys

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