Create UX Artefacts in Salesforce

In the realm of User Experience (UX) design, the creation and utilization of various artifacts play a pivotal role in shaping products that truly resonate with users. This blog delves into the essence of UX artifacts, offering a comprehensive overview of their types and applications. By engaging with this content, readers will gain insights into:

• UX Artifacts Role: The significance in the design process.
• Mapping Techniques: Overview of user-centered mapping methods.
• UX Maps Types: Key maps for visualizing user experience.
• Screen Design: Principles for effective screen layout.
• Prototyping: From low to high-fidelity prototypes.
• Service Blueprint Use Case: Diagramming product usage states.

Let’s get started!

What are UX Artifacts?

Designers produce various “artifacts” or craft-based deliverables as part of the UX design process. UX deliverables or artifacts are the research records, sketches, design files, prototypes, and other documentation the designers create to communicate their design ideas effectively. Understanding the users who use your product or service is important to create a solution that works best for them.

Types of UX Artifacts

Mapping

These UX artifacts are diagrammatic representations of a user’s experience. This keeps the user at the center of the design process and helps designers and stakeholders empathize with the user and understand gaps to identify opportunities for improvement. Mapping encourages people to approach problem-solving from a user-centered perspective. The information needed to create a UX map is gathered by holding workshops or talking with users.

Types of UX Maps

Journey Map: User journeys are about a series of steps a user takes and demonstrates the way the user currently interacts or could potentially interact with a product. Journey maps help you tell the story of a user’s interaction across all touchpoints. They demonstrate functionality, behavior, and key tasks a user might perform. Pain points can be identified to provide solutions and optimize current processes. When mapping a user journey, the designer needs to understand the user’s goals, motivations, persona, and the tasks they want to achieve.

Service Blueprint: A service blueprint visualizes the relationship between service components like people, processes and physical or digital evidence directly tied to the touchpoints in a specific customer journey. This is ideal in scenarios that involve multiple touchpoints or require cross-functional effort. The service blueprint can vary in scope, and the same service can have multiple blueprints if there are different scenarios involved.

Ecosystem Map: An ecosystem is a network of people interacting with products or services. Ecosystems include users, their practices, the information they use and share, the people with whom they interact, the services available to them etc. Ecosystem maps visualize complex relationships among multiple systems and aid in the creation of digital strategies. Ecosystem maps are closely related to other maps like experience maps, service blueprints, etc.

Empathy Map: Empathy maps widely used in agile and design communities visualize how users think, feel, act, or speak. Empathy maps can be created for each persona to consider user psychology and identify motivations behind the product or service’s persona. A square with four equal quadrants is used to understand and empathize with the persona – Say, Think, Feel, Do.

Mental Model: A mental model is what the user knows about the system at hand and is based on belief, not facts. This is used in web and application design to build a functionality that users learn to use easily because it is something they are already familiar with. These maps are the outcome of user research. For example, the shopping cart icon on an e-commerce website.

Storyboard: Storyboarding is used to understand what’s going on in the user’s world and how the products can make the user’s life better. A storyboard is a linear sequence of illustrations arrayed together to visualize a story, and as a UX tool, it predicts and explores a user’s experience with the product.

Screens

Designing screens starts with sketching. The focus of designing the screen should be on information hierarchy and the appropriate positioning of the design elements. Critical data and actions should be positioned in highly visible areas, whereas secondary and tertiary information can be placed in less noticeable areas. It is important to gather feedback in the early stage of screen design. Create a Wireframe when the design matures and improve areas that need work before creating a high-fidelity screen.

Prototypes

The UX team can create a sample version or a simulation of the final product for testing before launching the product. This is the fourth step of design thinking and the design sprints. With prototypes, static screens can be brought closer to reality. A coding prototype takes time to build and delays feedback but is the closest one can get to a real app, whereas a click-through prototype like InVision is a quick way to get early feedback.

Use Case

A team of designers is working on a new web application design and plan to diagrammatically represent the before and after states of product usage from a user’s perspective. Which mapping model should be used for this requirement?

Solution: Service Blueprint

Reason: A service blueprint diagrams the before and after states of using a product or service. Therefore, the designers can go deeper than a journey map by establishing a relationship between digital and physical interactions.

Conclusion

As we wrap up our exploration of creating UX artifacts in Salesforce, it’s clear that the journey to mastering user experience design within this powerful platform is both exciting and essential for developing solutions that truly meet user needs. From mapping user journeys to prototyping interactive designs, each step in the process is a building block towards creating more intuitive and engaging Salesforce applications.

For those looking to dive deeper into Salesforce UX design and beyond, there’s an incredible opportunity waiting for you with saasguru. Join our community on Slack, where you can connect with like-minded professionals, share insights, and learn from the experiences of others in the field. 

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