Salesforce Global Identity, Hub, and Setup

Design | Ideation, Vision, Funding, and Strategy

During the generative work on TrailblazerID (which was a project to unify the identity services for all external Salesforce properties), we had a parallel track of work to explore the same problem space for internal experiences and applications.

Salesforce’s many acquisitions over the years resulted in a fragmentation of systems where users had separate logins and identities for all the Salesforce applications from Sales, Marketing, Analytics, Commerce, and beyond. To add, there exists a collection of “global tools” and administrative tasks that live above all Salesforce applications that had no shared architecture or experiences.

This project set out to remedy that problem.

Project Kickoff & Alignment

Global Identity covered a very broad area of Salesforce and so required the cooperation of several product organizations. As the design lead, I was responsible for organizing the group, driving collaboration, and pulling together research, product, design, and doc to deliver the final vision.

The vision statement for the project.

A simplified explanation of the eventual solution.

As the project grew, additional stakeholders were added to the project.

I’m a stickler for timelines and goals. Without goals, projects might wander or have no concise ending.

At the time, the team was bullish on rolling TrailblazerID into Global Identity, resulting in one single identity service for ALL Salesforce. As of this writing, that remains a future roadmap goal.

Not only were we seeking to unify the user’s experiences, the framework that was emerging (now known as Salesforce Hub) needed to also unify the services layer in which these applications communicate.

Defining the System

Most projects I lead follow a similar trajectory, starting with aligning on the problem statement, vision, goals, and basic direction (and oftentimes this phase is preceded by generative research). After this first stage of the project I like to deliver schematics, workflows, and information architecture assets to 1) facilitate the design team’s ideation and 2) to drive communication and alignment with the larger team.

Getting a sense of the flow of data and identity.

When we started this project we couldn’t answer questions like, “when we say ‘cloud’ what do we mean?” or “when we say ‘tenant’ what do we mean?” — here, an example schematic to help explain those paradigms.

A visual taxonomy of the space illustrating the relationship of apps, tenants, clouds, and tools.

An extension of the same visual taxonomy to demonstrate a user’s relationship to those tool spaces.

Getting Pragmatic

With the basics out of the way, the team was freed up to begin ideating on the experience. We began articulating the navigation and app experiences that would soon double as resources for facilitating user validation.

Application navigation was a major subject of the project and here we see explorations of different ways of getting to/from different applications.

There were a lot of different ways that end-users could navigate to and from different Salesforce applications from across the entire ecosystem, here we see 2 early models for in-app navigation (a feature that was later deprioritized in favor of focusing on global experiences).

Stress testing and sharing the high-level overview of some of the simpler navigation models.

User validation began to take shape and the following are snapshots of the user validation sessions for the full end-to-end experiences.

This slide captures the narrative we used to begin fleshing out the UX of the experience. The following slides are wireframes and flows we used to validate the direction with stakeholders and users alike.

One of the resulting ideas from this project was a Global Setup experience which later became Salesforce Hub and a UI pattern for Global Setup Apps.

Next Phase of Design

After wireframes and validation, the project moved into higher fidelity designs and refinements to the navigation and interaction models.

Information architecture and schematic of the global app launcher.

The same UI with real data applied to demonstrate scalability.

A freezeframe from a set of usability flows showing a mock-up of a global profile page.

Global Setup

As mentioned, in addition to Global Identity, one of the other main tenants of the project was the notion of a Global Setup experience. Our research and design brought the in-app navigation models to an acceptable level of completeness and so we shifted to focus more intently on global setup.

Principles of Global Setup

Looking to existing app patterns for inspiration, I did an audit of the builders and experiences of Salesforce for education.

From the principles and research, I delivered several options that went into design critique and workgroup review.

An example demonstrating how the framework might scale to support a wider set of tools.

One of the first medium-fidelity mockups proposing a single landing page for all of the experiences a user has access to.

Final Designs

After further refinement, ideation, and vetting I was able to deliver the final designs for what soon became the model for the future of Global Setup apps.

Conclusion

The Global Identity project was ambitious in its scope and ahead of the rest of the company in realizing the full range of the problem and wanting to fund its solution. Close to the end of the time I was leading this project it was shelved in order to focus on the TrailblazerID .

Eventually, around 2019 this project gained funding and entered full development and now exists in several different capacities across a handful of product orgs including Customer 360, Salesforce Hub, and Global Identity teams.

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