Designed for contact center agents.

 

Developed on Salesforce.

My product team was large and comprised of two teams, the main one working on Salesforce development in Classic (Lightning Service Cloud was not yet live, but we had it in a sandbox.) These teams had never had a dedicated UX designer so part of my job was to bring standards established by our UX team into the designs I did for this group.

I had the best experience of my career so far in one aspect here: I had access to hundreds of all my contact center users, who were in three buildings in Atlanta, and I could go see them with just a phone call. I was constantly in and out of the centers and everything I worked on was directly inspired by something I saw or a direct answer to a need.

Another UX designer had been borrowed to work on a new Fraud app and it was not quite done when I was put onto the Contact Center team. I finished it, got it launched with developers and then did a lot of user observation to learn how we were still not solving their problems because they had to do double work in two apps. Long story, but I fought for them as much as I could, even providing a report with cost and efficiency analysis, but it was not a management priority.

Home Depot has developed their own facilitation process called the Orange Method and I was among the first people to go through this with our team. We also did a lot of design studios - I ran some and participated in some, and every Friday the UX team we had Design Crits and looked at one or two people's work. I also sat in on other team's user testing and helped do synthesis afterward, which was interesting as I saw a variety of other apps and areas of the company UX designers were working on.

You will see in my samples a bit of a mashup of my Material design within Classic as we were making our way toward the Lightning platform, plus some pure Material design prototypes. Our agents had to have a lot of training to use Classic and HD UX team has a goal of zero training, something incompatible with Salesforce. I made improvements, but could not do the full redesign I wanted to and that users needed while there.

To order parts, certain agents had to use green screens to get into warehouses and locate and find these parts. These agents were super fast from doing it so long, and when they wanted me to redesign this process to be a web app my biggest concern was it would slow them down. However, the server was being shut down so we had no choice, plus new agents could now do the parts ordering, whereas before it was too difficult to train them.

Every summer a dozen employees spend a ton of time just communicating about product delays of patio furniture, weirdly enough. This starts in the Spring when they have sales even bigger than Black Friday sales as the whole world is ready to make their outdoor living spaces better. It had been done manually using spreadsheets and these poor users just need to be able to have some help from an app while still uploading the spreadsheets with order info. I came up with a solution they loved that allowed them to upload the spreadsheets, keep it in that tabular format, but then take action to send appropriate messages to people with their estimated ship dates.

The UX team, and especially my Contact Center product team, was in a conundrum the entire time I was there. Lightning was barely out for the Sales cloud and not available yet for Service, and Salesforce, the company, did not have the branding flexibility we wanted to see. Our UX team of 100 people was on a mission to standardize employee apps and yet we had this Salesforce issue of it being their design and so limiting. We had a team of people trying to get to some decision about what to do, and constant discussions and even a full-day workshop with Salesforce UX & Lightning devs... and still had not made a firm decision when I left.