Drive Value by Focusing on Relationships
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the relationship design mindsets.
- Articulate the impact of relationship design mindsets on the design process.
- Explain the four principles that guide great UX design.
Set the Stage for Optimization
You can't act on what you don’t see or understand. So if you want to optimize your strategy based on data, you need to learn to design your data so it's understandable and aligned to your business needs.
Designing with your users’ needs in mind has always been one of the keys to building great experiences that drive value for an organization. In fact, we like to say that empathy is the bedrock of good design: Design begins with developing an understanding of who we’re designing for.
In order to frame that understanding, a designer starts by gathering information about the users’ intentions, goals, and desired actions. When you understand your users’ needs, you can design solutions to meet them. Designing something without that perspective can be a recipe for an end experience that speaks more to the designer’s point of view than that of the intended users.
Human-centered design (HCD) is a creative process that keeps people—the end users—at the center of the work. Design thinking builds on that approach with business innovation in mind.
Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation… It lets people find the sweet spot of feasibility, viability, and desirability while considering the real needs and desires of people.
HCD and design thinking have done amazing things to help designers and organizations build better experiences and better serve their users. After more than two decades in practice, we've found the benefits and breaking points of design thinking. In response to what we've learned, and to ways that the business and social contexts have changed in that time, at Salesforce we've developed our own practice. We call it relationship design.
Relationship design is a response to a shift in the world and in business. We recognize that there are new needs businesses have to respond to, and relationship design is a new way of looking at creating value, by building sustainable relationships. You can see how we do it throughout this module, and for more info you can check out our Relationship Design trail.
Relationship Design Mindsets
Businesses that embody the four relationship design mindsets in their work are able to foster strong relationships through the experiences they deliver to customers. These mindsets underpin all the relationship design work. For best results, combine:
- Compassion: The evolution of empathy. If empathy is a 1:1 word, compassion is solving something together.
- Intention: This is design at its essence. You define the sandbox with intention and then design the sand castle within it.
- Reciprocity: No one enters a relationship for its own sake. So let’s build tools to help you succeed, and find a way to work together to meet everyone’s needs.
- Courage: This reflects how we step up in those moments when business objectives run head-on into what we believe. It’s stepping up to live our values and facing our discomfort.
Putting Philosophy into Practice
The mindsets sound good in theory, but what are they asking you to do differently in your daily practice? Units two and three of this module get into relationship design in practice. First by exploring some of the tools in the RD toolbox, and then by walking through a fictional scenario that puts philosophy and tools into practice by way of (re-)designing a business app. We can’t get into all of that and pixel design and coding in a single module, so our focus here is on ways to define the problem your app seeks to solve and organizing the information your solution needs to present.
Let’s start by looking at the phases of the design process.
Phases of the Design Process
The design thinking process is defined by five phases: Discover, define, design, deliver, and deploy. You may have seen the same phases with different names, but they’re all essentially the same. Relationship design additionally asks us to consider the accountability, values, scale, and social contexts at play within each phase. Let’s explore.
Discover
The first phase, discover, is how we start to understand the problem at hand, and how we can measure our impact against our objectives in both business and social terms. The discover phase is guided by the question, What could we build?
Design thinking asks us to empathize with our end user(s) as part of seeing the problem through their eyes. Relationship design asks us to think beyond our direct user to consider possible wider ramifications of our solution.
- Are there wider trends (political, ecological, societal) related to this work?
- How are we ensuring that typically marginalized groups are strong voices in our design process?
- What biases do we have in identifying “good solutions,” and are they hindering our thinking?
- Is there user or customer feedback from a prior implementation that we need to incorporate into this discovery phase?
Define
Phase two is define. Define is guided by the question, What should we build? Here, we frame the challenge we’re solving, and begin to define our point of view on the right solution. Relationship design asks us to look at the role of diversity and values in our process.
- Are our values driving our work process and product?
- Are we valuing diverse opinions on what’s important?
- Will this concept cause unintentional harm to anyone?
Diversity is an important word and concept within relationship design. But diversity isn't just about justice or even kindness, it's also about market size, and scale. Consider this: How much of your market would you willingly sacrifice? When organizations marginalize whole groups of people, they're drastically shrinking their total addressable market.
Design
The third phase, design, is guided both by the question of what we should build (at a higher fidelity than in the define phase), and the questions of how our solution should look, feel, and behave. Relationship design has us also consider the social impact of potential solutions.
- How are our values expressed in this experience?
- Are we manifesting the values of inclusive design in this experience?
- Have we evaluated our ideas through the lens of compassion, reciprocity, courage, and intention?
- Will this concept cause unintentional harm to anyone?
- Are there domino-effects to potential solutions that create pain points for groups outside our direct audience?
Deliver and Deploy
Phases four and five, deliver and deploy, focus on what we’re actually building. Design work during these phases focuses on refining prototype details before going into production with live data. A designer’s tasks might include UX and UI development and production, and work on training materials, documentation, and success metrics.
These phases are marked by distilled thinking about the entire design and build process, from how we move from concept to minimum viable product (MVP), to our process for evaluating and refining that MVP as part of developing it into a market-ready solution. Here, relationship design asks questions about social context and accountability, including:
- How is our work demonstrating accountability to the business and society?
- Are our designs accessible to everyone, including marginalized groups?
- Are we able to support our concept well at scale?
- What are people doing with our concept that we may not have anticipated? Does it align with our values?
When we follow the phases of design thinking to create user experiences, we wind up building things that better suit our user’s needs. When we do so while also adhering to the principles of relationship design, our solutions also foster stronger relationships internally and externally along the way, which builds business value over time.
This practice also saves time and resources internally by building a shared understanding of our objectives early on and throughout the design and build process. Ideating, prototyping, and evaluating low-fidelity concepts early on helps create alignment before we invest in development. This greatly reduces design debt and the chances we’ll need to rebuild things later on!
Put It into Practice
We also hope to leave you with a strong sense of how UX design can turn a frustrating dashboard experience into an app that gives users what they need and leaves them feeling great about the experience. And don’t sell your own work short! One great UX experience can shape a person’s entire day at work, and even leave them headed into the weekend on a high note for some well-deserved relaxing and recharging. How?
As we hinted at, unit two of this module walks through a hypothetical build of an enterprise solution for a Salesforce customer. Important note: Much of what we’re saying in this module applies to all kinds of UX design work. We’re going to use a dashboard design example in unit two so we can be clear and specific. Let’s start with a question: What does the word dashboard make you think of?
If you associate dashboards with phrases like, “Information overload,” “Inactionable,” and “forgotten,” you’re (unfortunately!) not alone. Once meant to connote a visually concise screen providing at-a-glance status on key information, dashboards are now too commonly a dumping ground for indecipherable bar graphs and pie charts. Rather than getting a quick overview of their company’s or team’s vital signs, executives often walk away under- or even misinformed. Why? Bad design.
Now, think about apps. Envision a really well-designed, easy-to-use app that makes information easy to consume. What comes to mind?
Focused, task-oriented, actionable, and device-appropriate, great apps are works of UX art and engineering know-how. Rather than confusing users by attempting to oversimplify key business information while packing too much of it into a dense screen, great apps take a thoughtful approach to providing real utility.
How? By following the Lightning Design System’s four principles of great app design.
Principles of Great UX Design
- Clarity: Eliminate ambiguity from your app experience. Clarity enables its users to see, understand, and act with confidence. This list is ranked in order of priority, and clarity is #1. If it's not clear to the user right away what your product is supposed to do, you’ve lost them already and nothing else matters.
- Efficiency: Anticipate how users will make their way through app features to streamline and optimize workflows. This helps users work faster, smarter, and better.
- Consistency: Use the same names for the same things, similar graphic elements to represent the same parts of data, and so on. By applying the same solution to the same problem, you create familiarity and strengthen your user’s intuition. Consistency contributes to efficiency. When we reuse familiar patterns and UI elements, it's easier for the user to navigate through the experience.
- Beauty: Reward your busy users with thoughtful, elegant craftsmanship. Users demand professional-looking experiences—all else being equal, the better UI looks, the more people will trust it and use it.
Applied together, these principles breathe life and responsiveness into your app, and let your users enjoy a fluid experience.
If you’re designing an app (or any user experience) that visualizes data for your users, spend some time with the Lightning Design System Chart Guidelines. Charts tell the story of information, and this handy guide will get you started with selecting—and implementing—the best chart for whatever data you’re working with.
Next Up: What’s in Our Toolbox?
This unit explores what relationship design is all about and how to apply it to building great user experiences. It provides an overview of the design phases and the four Lightning principles of great UX design. Now it’s time to talk about tools! The next unit is a look inside the relationship design toolbox.
