The Problem As We Know It
Salesforce supports digital marketers in their day to day role through Marketing Cloud, a suite of 11 integrated tools. These tools work together to deliver exceptional customer experiences, but Journey Builder allows marketers to personalize the customer journey of acquisition, onboarding, engagement and retention from one platform. Journey Builder is the tool that makes it possible for marketers to connect with the right customers at the right time and with the right message.
From a feature perspective, Journey Builder is extremely valuable to a marketers everyday job executing campaigns. From an experience perspective, however, Journey Builder can be extremely stressful to use.
Salesforce gave us one task:
increase marketer confidence at the time of send.
Our Assumptions: Why aren’t marketers confident?
This problem centered around a product we had no experience with and no access to. We were told to increase confidence for users we had never met or interacted with. Making initial assumptions was the only way to move away to embrace the uncertainty and move forward to finding answers.
One assumption that we knew to be true, is that this problem is resistant to an obvious solution. This is because:
The experience needs to be built on confidence, which is developed over time.
The experience of pressing send is dependent on countless other touchpoints.
Marketer confidence doesn’t just come from the tool itself, but many external factors.
The experience can be extremely variable by user, use case or project.
The Process
This process diagram makes our design process look linear and simple—it was not. This project was challenging, iterative, messy and tested our ability to design experiences, not products.
Due to the nature of the project and the lack of resources provided, we had to get extremely creative about our methods, process and resources. Our approach to this problem was a unique one and focused heavily on marketers’ experiences and feelings at the time of send.
Discovery & Context Building
How do you start researching for a product you have no experience with and no access to? Pretend that you’re a marketer. We signed up for free webinars. We joined Salesforce email lists. We watched Youtube tutorials and read through public user manuals. We read the product pages and mapped the touchpoints between Journey Builder and the other Salesforce products involved in a marketing campaign to begin to empathize with a marketer’s daily life.
Competitive Analysis
With a bit of context about Salesforce and Journey Builder, we (unsuccessfully) attempted to conduct a competitive analysis. This proved to be a fast lesson in deploying methods with intentionality. At this point, we didn’t know enough about our own product to begin to compare it to the competitors. We didn’t know what key product dimensions were important to marketers. We simply didn’t know enough to gain valuable insights.
Collections Workbook
To frame the design space, deconstruct the key dimensions of the experience, and analyze common themes, we conducted a collections workbook of 40 exemplars across 8 key dimensions:
Voice and Tone
Customer Relationship Management
Story Building
Flowcharts & Diagrams
Breaking Down a Large Task
Software Suites
Using AI to Improve Experience
Review & Confirmation
Collections Insights
1. Hype ‘em up.
An encouraging tone in content offers less stressful experiences. The voice, tone and overall content in the Journey Builder product will need to be carefully crafted to remain highly empathetic for the user.
3. Break it down.
Any complex, long, or scary process can be made easier by breaking it down into smaller, more manageable bits. It makes users feel more in control. How can we break Journey Builder down?
2. It’s a diagram of a story.
At its core, Journey Builder is a diagram. There are many ways to approach building diagrams and telling stories that think beyond dragging-and-dropping or using shapes. These alternative approaches are worth exploring.
4. Lend a helping hand.
Utilizing a template. Offering suggestions. Safeguarding against errors. We all need it. We mostly love getting it. How can we help marketers more?
User Research
We were told to increase confidence for users we had never met or interacted with. More than that, we were designing for users that we had limited access to. We could only find 1 marketer that was using Journey Builder, but we knew relying on her experience alone would not be enough. We got creative with the participants we worked with and asked questions with a focus more on the marketing experience overall, than the tool being used.
This time spent with marketers was invaluable and 3 major themes came through that guided our entire project.
Interview Insights
Comparing Insights to Theory
To make sure we were solving the right problem and rooting our solutions in experience rather than usability, we relied on various experience design theories to position our thinking. Hassenzahl’s Model of Experience served as a key theory for understanding and empathizing with the marketer experience.
From our analysis and interpretation of Journey Builder’s role, the primary position of Journey Builder lies in the Motor Goals of a marketer. Because Journey Builder also offers unprecedented scale, it influences Do Goals to some degree, but barely meets and often frustrates Be Goals.
Are solving the right problem?
As we looked back through our data, we felt a misalignment between the prompt we were given and then insights we had gathered. There was an overwhelming feeling that confidence wasn’t really the problem.
Users told us over and over again that the joy from being a marketer comes in pre-deployment and post-deployment, but it rarely comes at the time of execution.
At its core, Journey Builder is just the tool that executes a plan. The relationship that a marketer has with their tool can and should be more than fear and uncertainty. It should be a relationship based in trust.