Internship At Salesforce

Summer 2016

This past summer, I interned at Salesforce as a user researcher. I worked with researchers and designers on the Service Cloud (shout-out to the entire research team and the designers on Service!). I had a great summer learning about UX in the enterprise setting. I signed an NDA, so the details of  the projects that I worked on cannot be fully discussed. I'd love to talk in person if you are curious about my general processes.

Part of the Service Cloud- Service Console 

Part of the Service Cloud- Service Console

 

Over the course of the summer, I conducted usability evaluations, guided Service Design workshops, and engaged in other research activities to help better understand the Service Cloud and how it can be improved for users.

 I also researched for a Dreamforce talk on the best practices of social customer support. This research required interviews, a literature review, and a competitive analysis. My mentor and manager, Kathy Baxter gave a talk based on my work. 

Learnings

I learned a lot of different things from the entire team at Salesforce (and particularly enterprise), but I think that I had 3 major takeaways:

  1. Enterprise takes a lot of collaboration. I learned a lot from the collective knowledge of my colleagues. Enterprise is complex, so having those conversations with one another to learn and better understand is critical. Everyone's experience and knowledge varied, so I found that discussions with one another were where initial research questions began.
  2. Your end-user is different than the purchaser. I didn't realize how complex enterprise really is, but it is. You have to think about the purchaser, what decisions are they making, and what processes are they keeping in mind. Then you have to consider the end-user, where you have to understand what their roles and flows are like, and how they interact with the product. Those are the most basic questions, in enterprise-- but it's much more complicated than that. 
  3. Be prepared to work-around! This is really just an overall learning for UX research in industry as a whole, but you need to be flexible and open to changing study plans or adapting to conditions that are different from your expectations. Enterprise has a lot of unknown variables (organizational processes, job roles, etc.), so you have to be quick and think fast to make things work.