The Challenge
For over a decade, Salesforce Marketing Cloud has existed across three completely separate platforms.
And throughout this decade, no platform had been meaningfully integrated — from a tech stack nor a user experience perspective.
Introducing: Marketing Cloud Next
Fast-forward to 2023. We set out to create a new Marketing Cloud: one that would merge the capabilities above into a single platform.
My Assignment
I became responsible for the Campaign experience of MC Next, creating an experience that would feel at home for both new and existing customers.
Crafting the Strategy
As with every project, I first set out to build clarity, alignment, and set the foundation we would build on. I wanted it to be grounded in 3 key things: Customer Pain Points, Customer Types, and Mental Models.
1. Identifying Customer Pain Points
I wanted the strategy to be based in research.
With over a decade of marketing research and institutional knowledge available, I read through every internal study I could find (about 10-15 of them), understand as much as I could about what our researchers had learned over the years that directly or indirectly touched on marketing campaigns.
My “aha” moment came from a couple of slides within a semi-recent Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) research deck. The deck described 3 key pain points marketers faced, and the role of Campaigns in resolving those pain points. Welp, there it was.
2. Customer Types: Sophistication & Maturity
In discussions, we found ourselves talking about different “simple” and “advanced” types of users, as well as various planned product tiers. But there seemed to be more to it. We parsed this out into spectrums of:
- Sophistication – How nuanced are the team’s marketing goals?
- Maturity – How well does the team understand what they need?
This matrix would allow us to discuss various marketing topics in more nuanced ways, for many years to come.
3. Mental Model: Elements of a Campaign
The final strategy element was addressing “How do we think about and describe a campaign amongst ourselves?” The language we use internally would shape the outcome for our users.
For this, I distilled our decades of institutional knowledge and intuition into a set of 4 Campaign Elements — fundamental units of what it means to be a campaign.
Crafting the Process
From the very beginning, we had ideas coming at us left and right, from across all of our partnerships.
How would we keep track of these ideas and ideate on them release-over-release? How would we prioritize? How could we rope in collaborators in focused, purposeful ways? How could we keep ideation separate from release specs? How could other designers pull from the latest Campaign designs for various demos and release work? How could stakeholders check in and get confidence in our work?
These questions were largely solved by creating two types of Figma files for each release:
- R&D Figmas
Divergent explorations around various topics. - Spec Figmas
Convergent work sliced out of the R&D explorations. This served multiple purposes: For engineers, it served as the specs. For designer collaborators, a Campaigns Figma library. For stakeholders, they could see the screen-flows of “what is Campaigns doing this release?”
Visiontypes
Additionally, every 6-12 months, I planned for us to have a Vision Figma that would pull from some of the most promising R&D ideas, and weave them together into a story. Sometimes these were leadership-driven, other times I made my own.
Prioritization
This was always a struggle. Prioritization at Salesforce is always a tension between top-down and bottom-up ideas, and so we needed a way to triage ideas objectively.
Amidst lots of organizational change, I made strides towards implementing RICE analysis, combined with future Kano analysis, to triage a growing icebox of dozens of Campaign ideas coming from all directions.
First Learning: Console UI
From our strategy, we had established a few ideas:
- Campaigns serve as the organizing structure for marketing efforts.
- Campaigns are the “hub” for nearly all other marketing JTBDs.
- People needed to move between their jobs in flexible, non-linear ways.
- We needed to allow space for unknowns and extensibility
During this time, Salesforce “record homes”, the detail views of single objects, followed a dashboard-like layout, optimized for customization.
We needed to boldly question the assumption that this standard practice was best for campaigns.
We explored a number of solutions, and navigated lots of strong, dissenting opinions to each. The debate came down to:
- Customizable vs Opinionated
- Pre-Built vs Custom Components
Ultimately, we landed on creating a completely new view: a single master-detail console component. This providing a flexible sidebar, rapid movement between surfaces, and an opinionated structure to what a “campaign” truly is.
Second Learning: Flow Summary
With the Campaign Console live, we began to encounter new usability feedback in our research: Customers struggled to build out basic messaging flows due to reliance on Salesforce’s automation service, Flow Builder.
Flow Builder was originally created for advanced admins to automate business processes — a very different persona than our non-tech-saavy, visual heavy marketers.
To solve this, we explored solutions that freed us from service dependencies. We envisioned a new surface that we called the Flow Summary: a heavily distilled form of Flow Builder that lived directly in the Flow UI. It would be able to focus marketer-centric guidance in ways that the Flow service could not, and could provide views of the messages in ways that Flow Builder never planned to implement themselves.
But Flow is a very powerful automation tool — so what about the more complex flows?
For the two levels of sophistication defined in our strategy, we provided two different views for the Flow Summary: a Simple Path view, and a Complex Flow view for summarizing more complex configurations.
Our first pass at this proved to be a major step forward for usability. It clarified the mental model between a Campaign and its associated Flow automations, allowed for a more visual summary of messages, and created a UI layer for us to “speak to the user” more purposefully in a guidance layer.
But as any first pass, it was fraught with new usability bugs that we’ve continued to iron out over subsequent releases.
Impact
Customer Impact
The new Campaign Console approach, coupled with the Flow Summary, proved to be instrumental in uplifting adoption and usability ratings for MoC overall.
It created an abstracted surface for us to continue solving multiple other pain points, that would otherwise be outside of our control, due to the number of services and teams required to make MoC function.
And it set us on course for a scaleable and extensible future, with new features and integrations from 3rd party partners.
Internal Impact
For our team, there were immeasurable benefits as well. With a frequently-maintained Figma Library, the Campaign became a surface that designers could easily and excitedly explore within. We raised the bar in the art of the possible.
And perhaps most importantly, we could all rest at night knowing we had done the best job possible to serve our customers. This was work that made everyone proud.