Guardrails

Design | Vision, Testing, Delivery

Salesforce is a massive platform. It’s hard for any single human to fully comprehend all the bits and pieces. Typically, users that have to customize or build on the Salesforce platform will be experts in only a few select areas of the product.

Even in those areas that users might excel in, the nuances and details of the features continue to grow in complexity. This is where Guardrails come to the rescue. By building an intelligent framework that can offer insights, data, and best practices in response to user actions, we are able to give every user a “consultant over your shoulder” experience.

Problem Framing

This problem space was well known from years of research with Admins and Developers. After a long tail of us wanting to do something about it, we finally took action during a lull in the release. Here, some excerpts from the problem definition deck:

One of the most rewarding exercises was plotting various common problem areas(derived from user surveys) across a quadrant matrix to determine when, how, and where these tips should appear.

The researcher and I formed principles around these problem areas, offering examples of common best practice solutions as a guide.

Validation

In one shape or another, the idea of Guardrails had been discussed for some time at Salesforce. Armed with that existing wealth of information, new foundational research, and a concise problem definition, the VP of Product, the researcher, and I all got together and formed 3 distinct models of interaction:

From there, we entered a series of controlled validation sessions and began our tests.

The combined results from these usability and validation sessions allowed us to bring the feature set into a renewed sense of clarity.

At Salesforce, we try to incorporate research into every project, though, oftentimes we don’t have that luxury. We were lucky to have such a talented researcher on this project.

The Framework in More Detail

For the next month or so I noodled on the feature some more, fleshing out more of the details of the interactions including aggregated lists of tips, informative toasts, actionable alerts, pulsating notifications, and a notifications management center.

The End Result

Ultimately, I ended up being promoted before this project took flight. In a twist of fate, Guardrails came back to my purview when a designer on my team was assigned to the same product area. It was rewarding to see the final version make its way into the product (more on that in Director of Automation & Customization).

Guidelines

The one thing that did end up sticking around from my time supporting this feature were the guidelines I published on how to implement Guardrails throughout the product. Since this was evolving as a framework for all of Salesforce, it was prudent to provide guidance on what made for a good Guardrail.

My biggest fear was Guardrails turning into Microsoft’s Clippy (thankfully cooler heads prevailed).

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