Salesforce

Empowered, Confident, and Prepared: Driving Chatbot Product Vision through User Research

MOLLY MAHAR Salesforce GREGORY A. BENNETT Salesforce This case study explores how a series of customer site visits to two international service centers drove design recommendations for a chatbot building platform that could encourage positive agent-chatbot collaboration. The first part of the case focuses on the research undertaken by a team of user experience practitioners at the enterprise software company Salesforce. The team used contextual inquiry and group interviews to better understand the daily experience of customer service agents and service teams in search of ways to responsibly implement automation tools like chatbots within a service center environment. The second part of the case study highlights how the UX team applied these learnings into specific product recommendations and developed a set of principles that could drive the product forward while remaining empathetic and supportive of customer service agents....

From UI to UX: Building Ethnographic Praxis in a Usability Engineering Culture

KIRSTEN BANDYOPADHYAY SalesforceREBECCA BUCK Salesforce In this never before shared case study, we explain how our UX research team increased its scope of work from surface-level UI issues to a full portfolio of user-centered research. We use organizational ethnography and organizational change literature to develop a three phase model of research team growth. We then discuss the implications of our model for strengthening ethnographic praxis in cultures dominated by usability engineering. We conclude with a reflection on building internal bridges to facilitate change. Keywords: organizational change, UI, UX, research, ethnography, usability, lean....

Same Findings, Different Story, Greater Impact: A Case Study in Communicating Research

by MABEL CHAN, Salesforce The Salesforce Platform empowers customers to build applications that are highly customized to their particular business operations and data. As platform researchers, we help create the tools that enable customers, including Salesforce administrators, to build these applications. Last year, the platform research team at Salesforce embarked on a project to update our existing UX personas. We had inherited two sets of persona work that described Platform users, but neither was actually being used to guide product-related decisions. One of the projects, the results of a skill segmentation survey, was regarded as accurate and credible, but was reported through dense tables of data and few stakeholders read or referenced it. The other was a more traditional set of personas that was easy to consume, but lacked specificity and was perceived as too superficial to be useful in decision-making. While this original persona work was based in research, it sat underutilized by researchers, designers, and product managers...