Making Salesforce Easier to Learn

One of the reasons for the switch to new financial planning tools was to improve the service to high net worth clients and offer them a wider range of financial products. To accommodate the new tools I worked with product management, business analysts, and system architects.

We created a business process map together, and from there I created a a high level journey and competitive analysis to help visualize the changes across the org. We accomplished the following by analyzing the advisor workflows together to identify pain points in the workflows and elements that impact training.

Preparing Salesforce for the Update

Making changes to Salesforce has a large impact as it's a critical starting point for most advising actions, so it has consequences throughout the organization, such as new advisors, advisor assistants, training departments, and multiple groups at the home office. Unsurprisingly, making changes here can add a lot of added stress, even making small updates requires a lot of approvals.

Previous Version

Salesforce is still a new tool for the company so there is a lot of design and usability debt. One aspect of this is a lot of the language was made internally without much outside feedback. Resulting in links that have multiple names, names based on current tools, and names unrelated to actions or workflows.

Updated Version

The recommendation I designed used basic design patterns to improve spacing to make the links more legible, reduce misclicks, and chunked information by service type to allow elements to be found more quickly.

I worked with a UX writer to update the copy to be more action oriented and aligned with advisor workflows and training. We initially met with the training team to create an initial prototype, then interviewed multiple new and senior advisors to finalize the language.