Get to Know the Salesforce Designer Role

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Describe what a Salesforce designer does.
List the skills that Salesforce designers use in their work.

What Is a Salesforce Designer?

A Salesforce designer is passionate about creating human-centered design (HCD) experiences that drive business outcomes on the Salesforce Platform. They use relationship design, a creative practice that builds solid relationships and, in turn, drives social and business value. Salesforce experiences should enable users to do their jobs better, with less friction, than with alternate tools and methods. Salesforce designers help identify the right solutions to build. They make technology clear and easy to use, more beautiful, more efficient, and consistent across solutions.

Read on to learn what Salesforce designers do, specializations you can pursue, and how designers drive value.

Explore the Different Kinds of Salesforce Designers

Salesforce designers come to their practices in various ways. Some designers have a visual design background. Some focus on user experience (UX). Others have deep experience with design strategy. Some are Salesforce-certified as an admin, architect, developer, consultant, or marketer.

Regardless of where you sit on a team, and whether you call yourself a designer, design is a key ingredient across nearly half of Salesforce roles. You may be “doing design” and not even know it!

Salesforce designers use insights uncovered through the design process to optimize flows, interactions, and visual interfaces so that experiences built on the Salesforce Platform are intuitive. It also includes things like aligning stakeholders, conducting and synthesizing research, and advocating for ethics and values on behalf of both users and the organization.

Hey, wait a minute. Those lists of work are at really different levels, right? Optimizing flows seems technical, and aligning stakeholders seems more strategic. Is the same person doing that work? Because no two situations are the same, the most comprehensive answer we can give is “sometimes.”

This is where specialization comes in. Depending on the situation, you may need a designer focused at an interface or technical level, whereas another project needs a designer focused on strategy. And there can be yet another situation where a single designer does it all!

Compare UX Design and Strategy Design Responsibilities

We’ve developed certifications and the learning for two design specialties: UX design and strategy design.

Strategy designers tend to play a critical role early in a project, even before kickoff. UX designers play a critical role toward the end of a project. However, that is certainly not a hard rule. Ideally a strategist should participate all the way through until launch. And a UX designer should participate from the kickoff to fully appreciate the decisions and insights driving the ultimate end-user experience. The degree of participation will change throughout a project, as will who’s driving the progress.

As mentioned, strategy designers typically start earlier in the process, framing challenges and asking questions like, “What should we build?”, “What challenges are we solving?”, and “Why is this the best approach?” The role is equal parts creating, and aligning stakeholders. It’s a specialization that brings disciplines like engineering, customer service, sales, and marketing together to articulate a desired future state that works in terms of desirability to customers, viability for the business, and technical feasibility.

UX designers focus on the user experience—its look, feel, and behavior. They’re like builders getting a set of building blocks or construction workers getting blueprints and materials. A Salesforce UX designer knows the ins and outs of what is feasible on the platform. They create a realistic picture of what the experience should look and feel like. They can take the strategic vision and collaborate with developers and admins to make it a reality.

Venn diagram with Desirability, Viability, and Feasibility in intersecting circles; the middle is shaded and the words Start here with an arrow pointing to Desirability

Did you get the key terms here? Both roles work with teams guided by three key criteria—desirability, by researching users and their needs, viability, by understanding the business model and how what we’re proposing fits, and feasibility, to ensure the solution can be built and sustained at scale.

Strategy design complements UX design. The overlap of skills within the two specializations is a good thing, as it ensures continuity of effort even when there’s a handoff.

Salesforce Designer: A Day in the Life

Shoe manufacturer and retailer Cloud Kicks uses Salesforce to manage its customers, vendors, online sales, and marketing. The company already delivers a great digital experience, and its customers can make purchases online for in-store pickup. But its sales reps are starting to feel some pain. The reps don’t have easy access to Sales Cloud to update their vendor data when they’re in the field.

The Salesforce strategy designer assembles a diverse team of roles and backgrounds to spin up a discovery (research) phase to better understand the pains and motivations of the Cloud Kicks sales team. They ensure the team consists of an architect, business stakeholders, an admin, a UX designer and any other business roles that have a relationship with Cloud Kicks and a stake in the solution.

The strategy designer uses their knowledge of platform capabilities and business skills, and analytical and creative thinking to align Cloud Kicks leadership around a strategic vision for the future of field sales via a next-gen mobile experience built on Lightning. They articulate the moments that matter to the users, and focus on identifying what’s optimal in those moments. They collaborate with a UX designer to produce prototypes, ensuring design systems and patterns are being used in the most effective ways. A tight partnership between the UX designer and the development team ensures the journey from “strategic vision” to “build reality” is as smooth as it can be.

When the project moves into the build phase, the UX designer takes the lead role, fleshing out all use cases and interface elements. They continue to collaborate with the strategy designer to ensure that each release stays aligned with the broader vision and delivers user value. They discuss questions like:

Which combination of features will strike the right balance of being big enough to drive user value and small enough to be realistic in the timeframe?
Are the micro decisions we’re making supporting our business goals in addition to our user needs?
Have we learned anything recently that challenges the vision or roadmap we’ve created?
Have we run into technical difficulties building anything we designed, and do we need to consider alternate solutions?
What metrics are we collecting to help us continually learn about customer satisfaction and needs?

After launching the product, the UX designers and strategy designers bring the team back together to do a retrospective on how the project went from the idea to launch. This is an important conversation to record specific lessons learned. But just as important, the designers need to stay connected.

In order to maximize viability to the business, it’s important to ensure the strategic vision-setters stay updated on current platform capabilities and understand how technologists are pushing the feasibility envelope on what’s possible, driven by desirability to the end-user.

Required Skills

Successful Salesforce designers typically have a broad background in human centered design principles and experience with the Salesforce Platform. Each specialization also has some specific skills associated with it.

Here are the skills and specializations a Salesforce UX designer should have.

User research and usability testing
Prototyping, wireframing, user flows, mockups
Digital design tools like Sketch, Figma, and Photoshop
Design systems
Visual design
Information architecture
Platforms and application development concepts
Common web languages like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS
Web accessibility principles and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
Communication, presentation, and storytelling
Collaboration and workshop facilitation

Here are the skills and specializations a Salesforce strategy designer should have.

Crafting challenge statements (ensuring we’re solving the right problem)
Identifying success metrics and signals (understanding how we’re doing)
Inclusive design methodologies for design research, teaming, and co-creation
Showing how Salesforce products can be used to solve specific business challenges
Shaping an idea to ensure feasibility, desirability, and viability
Various methods of collaboration and co-design
Creating alignment behind a strategy, vision, or concept, including presenting ideas, defending rationale, facilitating discussions and decision making, and cultivating belonging and co-ownership for stakeholders
Creating high-level roadmaps for implementation that maintain the integrity of the vision while bridging near- to longer-term thinking
Facilitating productive collaboration across disparate disciplines and perspectives
Advocating for ethics on behalf of users and the business

Get the Scoop on the Salesforce Designer Role

You just learned about the Salesforce designer, and specializations in UX and strategy design. You learned how these specializations work together to solve complex problems and design ethical, equitable, and sustainable solutions on the Salesforce Platform.

If you’re wondering what a career as a Salesforce designer looks like, check out our Salesforce Design Careers page. This is a good place to start exploring the designer role and pursuing a career as a Salesforce designer. Consider joining the Trailblazer Community, where you can ask questions and learn from others about becoming a #DreamDesigner. And check out the certifications, which are essential to getting hired and becoming a successful designer.