How Salesforce IdeaExchange introduced Prioritization with InVision

Company size

  • 49,000

Headquarters

  • San Francisco, CA

Industry

  • Cloud computing
  • Software

Since launching in 1999, Salesforce has been on a rocket ship trajectory. Its top-ranking customer relationship management (CRM) software is used by more than 150,000 companies globally to manage all interactions and relationships with their customers.

Given the importance of customer success to the company’s mission, Salesforce has always prioritized listening to customer feedback through research, insights, roadshows, and community platforms.

One of those platforms is IdeaExchange. Launched in 2006, IdeaExchange gives the Salesforce community the option to post, vote, and comment on user-submitted ideas, many of which become product features. IdeaExchange reinforces Salesforce’s belief in the value of relationships with its customers, creating a forum for them to suggest product improvements and influence Salesforce's product roadmap. Given the company’s rapid growth, it was increasingly important that IdeaExchange ideas were acted on and not just shared–that’s where InVision came in.

Salesforce+
InVision

Since joining InVision, Salesforce has leveraged InVision's full product suite.

Challenge

The refresh with InVision consisted of two key parts:

The program: Ensure the community ideas and inputs in IdeaExchange are heard and increase visibility to the product roadmap.

The product: Implement functionality  where community members can prioritize features for upcoming releases and better the process of idea submission and voting.

The Salesforce IdeaExchange team addressed the programmatic challenges, and was able to leverage the InVision platform to rebuild IdeaExchange quickly and effectively.

Solution

The InVision platform helped the IdeaExchange team streamline the workflow for design, and bring engineering and product team members into the same tool as their design partners.

InVision Enterprise: Scale the strategic impact of design across an organization

Product and development partners use the commenting feature within Prototype to provide clear feedback on a specific aspect of the design. Clickable prototypes also help the product manager, developers, and stakeholders understand the user experience. This was previously achieved by talking through the flow in a meeting or manually documenting steps. And while it may seem minor, auto-updated prototype links mean that the product manager no longer spends precious time hunting down the latest files when updating documents.

InVision Enterprise enabled us to consolidate and keep our files in a single place. In addition, being able to easily share our InVision boards allows us to communicate our work to the broader Salesforce organization.

Carly Berman

Senior Product Manager, Salesforce

Inspect: Go from design to code fast

Designers previously followed a typical handoff process with engineering, manually updating specifications with each new design update. Because developers have access to view InVision prototypes in Inspect, it saves the design team considerable time making (and double-checking) updates. As developers are able to see every state and flow with Inspect, designers can select only the most critical areas of the design to spec out. And the ability for developers to select specifications for the exact components they want to see reduces the amount of clutter on the page. Finally, Inspect allows engineers to quickly code the final designs with minimal questions on the CSS around size, spacing, fonts, and colors.

Craft: Keep tools and teams connected for a seamless workflow

Staying true to their North Star, the team knew getting user feedback quickly on the concepts they were exploring was critical. The Craft-Sketch integration allows designers to quickly go from designing in Sketch to prototyping in InVision.

Prioritization, a new IdeaExchange feature based on feedback, was launched at Dreamforce 2019

Result

The Salesforce team launched exciting new functionality, Prioritization, at Dreamforce 2019. Early feedback confirmed the overall experience is innovative, intuitive, and fun. Prioritization also solves a key business initiative: Empowering customers to share their voice and shape Salesforce products.

Connecting the product development workflow in InVision’s platform ensured that design, engineering, and product management could work in sync and deliver the new IdeaExchange features on time, and showcase a great product experience.

With Craft, the team’s prototypes reflected the most recent Sketch design. This allowed the team to shrink user testing time frames from a week to a couple of days. Faster prototyping enabled the design team to test more concepts, get more feedback, and ensure they were building a product that solves customer needs.

Inspect saved each designer on average four hours per week by eliminating the need to manually create specifications. The team estimates that previously, the project would have taken four days of work, with manual requirements, plus checking for accuracy. That’s four days the team can now spend on the more important tasks of designing, testing, and refining IdeaExchange features.

Inspect helps the design team save valuable time by automatically creating specifications. With InVision Enterprise, design updates are reflected instantly, allowing product, engineering, and stakeholders to review and comment on the latest designs quickly and easily.

David Tsai

User Experience Lead, Salesforce

Collaborating and commenting in InVision Enterprise led to two to three fewer design review meetings per week, freeing up precious time for product manager, designers, engineers, and other key stakeholders.

InVision’s platform empowered the cross-functional IdeaExchange team at Salesforce to work together and successfully reimagine the product. Customers now have a space to more easily co-create with the team at Salesforce, leading to more authentic conversations and more active exchanges — key elements for building and strengthening relationships.

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