With companies focusing on delivering the best customer experience, constant efforts are made to improve the User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) design of the website or solution. The demand for UI/UX design implementation is continuing to grow. Designers follow many disciplines to create a better online experience for everyone by improving accessibility, user research, and prototyping. We can thus say that UI and UX design covers a vast area, exceeding the simple wireframes.
Businesses are very much convinced about the efficacy of UX, but they don’t know that the results can be outstanding. Studies show that strategic UX design can boost conversion rates by 400% and minimizes the development time.
So far, we know the importance of UI/UX, but we should also know how to achieve a design that gives results. Here we have outlined some processes that help to achieve a successful UI/UX design implementation.
This is the first and the most important stage of any UI/UX design implementation, the discovery process. In this phase, the designers will understand business challenges and get a closer look at the stakeholders. Without thorough discovery, it will be a struggle to get off the ground to get the right design.
The designers might take the time and consideration to absorb your business environment and ask the questions to determine what your audience needs from the end product.
After exploring the discovery phase, designers will have to map out the existing processes. The ‘As-Is’ mapping will identify the problems, which can be possible bottlenecks and areas having an under-developed resource.
This explorative stage will form the basis of the ‘To-Be’ processes. Here you will set out a loose structure to fix any significant pain points from the as-is design.
After the process mapping, extensive UI/UX design research is performed to identify the key players in your market. This will help to inform the look and feel of the website or application. This user research forms the basis for the wireframe prototype.
The research is more than just assembling a mood board of brands. It is the stage where you reach out to real customers for feedback on the existing product and their ideal end product. UI and UX user research can provide actionable UI and UX insights that will help in development.
The best approach to conduct user research is to use a mixed-method approach to quantify wider opinion for validity and create a rich contextualized view of your customers’ behaviors and attitudes.
Designers and platform app builders will use every information learned to deliver a tangible prototype that can be tested with users. Take a step back to determine whether the product in its current state can solve the issues identified in stage one. That is to check if it is meeting the needs of the users at every juncture?
The prototype can be of two versions:
Low-Fi prototypes are paper-based and initial designs that tell the look and feel of a product. High-Fi prototypes are designs closer to the MVP or a product release.
From here developers will take over the work to turn the digital product into a reality. After implementing any changes required after the prototyping phase, assets are exported to developers.
By this time, you’ll be sure that the UI and UX design will meet user expectations so you can get more creative. Designers can use design assets such as micro-animations, iconography, and video to make the interface more influential.
This tour of a UI and UX design project roadmap will help you know all the stages that will be covered to get an interactive and influential design for your site or application.
To get off the ground on the right foot, you’ll need the help and guidance of experienced UI/UX designers and Salesforce experts who know their way well through the process of design implementation.
Talk to us to know how we can help you deliver the best customer experience with a suitable UI/UX for your product.
Salesforce Orgs become unmanageably complex over time. The complexity can occur because of poor change and release management practices, corporate mergers, and acquisitions, disruptive administrative turnover, or failed development projects. All of the complexities caused by such issues can end up in slow performance, sluggish adoption, reduced agility, and business misalignment.
Managing technical debt in Salesforce is one such challenge almost all enterprises face. As Salesforce instances get older and the services of a company get more complex, it can cause the accumulation of technical debt. Having a small amount of technical debt is quite normal, but a Salesforce org having too much technical debt can be brittle and can lead to performance issues, making it more expensive to maintain with time. This is why most companies go for Salesforce support plans to keep the technical debt at the minimum. Let’s learn more about technical debt and how to avoid it.
In Salesforce, technical debt extends beyond code and includes overlapped or abandoned processes, custom fields, and workflows. Technical Debt is classified into two segments – it can be incurred or evolved. Incurred technical debt is inadvertently or deliberately accumulated, just like using an obsolete method of solving a problem. An example is to use a Salesforce feature that is about to be retired. On the other hand, the evolved technical debt is created over time because of the changes in your Salesforce org. An example of this is when an organization has to retire a solution because of significant growth in its Salesforce contacts that made the historic solution obsolete.
You have to avoid monopolizing the capacity of your team on fixing and stalling/blocking necessary deployments. Here are some best practices that could be helpful and can result in avoiding the issue of technical debt in Salesforce.
Departments should not request Salesforce customizations in a vacuum. It can end up in overlapping functionalities, leading to technical debt. Go for a Scheduled Release Process for addressing it and make sure that all the major Salesforce updates are aligned on a monthly cadence. You must have a prescribed, regular Salesforce release schedule. It includes all incoming requests being prioritized and visible across the organization. This helps the user to understand what should be covered as part of a monthly release versus what should be prioritized in a Salesforce backlog. Hiring experienced Salesforce customization services can help you out with this.
Salesforce platform is itself a collection of reusable patterns: Process Builder to deliver automation, Lightning Component Framework to create a consistent user experience, or Custom Objects to extend the data model- all of these are strong functional patterns. Salesforce solutions you use for your business should follow a consistent pattern. You must identify those patterns that frequently appear across your business and have a high impact on velocity, then invest in making these patterns strong. In other words, you need to look for the ‘best buy’ patterns to ensure higher efficiency while avoiding technical debt.
When moving on with any new system, team members leave behind old processes, workflows, and fields that accumulate and become a plaque. New employees usually don’t have any clue of what exists and/or when human intervention is required in the processes. This, along with a lack of documentation, can become a reason for technical debt. Salesforce support services decrease human intervention wherever possible and automate processes to help to avoid such an issue.
Teams that don’t invest in improvements quickly burn more than 30% of their time dealing with technical debt. By allocating time upfront and regularly tracking the debt, you can consciously look for the right level of refactoring and deliver a high-value solution instead of building features on shaky foundations that can easily be compromised. While planning at the start of the project, allocating resources away from new features feels like a huge investment. But the payback overtime comes in the form of improved velocity and reduced entropy.
Companies can use Salesforce Data and APIs to generate reports to visualize the complexity of their Salesforce Org. Most Salesforce accounts get more complex every day with each account adding into it. This makes it important that the cleanup and optimization should become a regular part of the change and release management practice. Or you can make it all go away by letting Salesforce experts handle your Salesforce account, avoiding any technical debt. Contact our Salesforce Professional Services for any such help.
Pardot is a marketing automation tool aimed at cutting down the Marketing and Sales team attempts to comprehend the most lucrative leads, seal-the-deal, and maximize ROI paving the way for seamless connectivity with clients through Social Media & Paid Marketing.
It’s close cousin, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a unified platform for orchestrated customer relationships that opens up management of relationships and campaigns across the customers. Besides, it gets your business insights into various stages of a customer’s journey and their experiences too.
Broadly Pardot and Marketing Cloud have a lot in common they’re both automation and digital analytics platforms aimed at email automation, lead nurture journey mapping, social media marketing, and CRM integration.
Pardot is mostly a B2B platform while the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is more B2C focused. The former primarily an email marketing platform while the latter brings together several dedicated marketing offerings that Salesforce packages as ‘studios’ or workspaces.
Pardot enables better alignment and orientation of effort through funnels and scoring for B2B teams which lead into reports that measure marketing performance rubrics. It also triggers actions based on the completion status of activities. On the other hand, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is suited for one-on-one customer journeys. The two don’t directly compete in terms of their intended audience, and one isn’t necessarily better than the other.
Pardot is a marketing platform intended to address the needs of business-to-business (B2B) clients, whereas the Marketing Cloud is a broad platform that caters to the business-to-customer (B2C) operations. The main aspects which differentiate Pardot and Marketing cloud are listed below:
1. Channels
As an effective means of connectivity and engagement, the channels used in Pardot are Emails and Social media whereas the marketing cloud involves Social, SMS, Display advertising as a medium to accumulate data and engage with audience segments
Pardot capacity has multi-channel support, whereas the capabilities of the marketing cloud include cross-channel support for social media, websites, emails, and much more.
2. Popularity
Pardot is industry-agnostic and quite popular with a professional stream of sales teams. On the contrary, marketing-cloud deals with a wide spectrum of realms including FMCGs and retail.
3. Use-cases
Capabilities typical of Pardot care lead generation, lead scoring, lead assignment, email campaigns, content marketing, webinar marketing.
On the other hand, the best keywords exhibiting the Marketing cloud efficacies are Messaging in real-time, marketing in Cross-Channel, Mobile, Social Media, Display Marketing, E-Commerce.
4. Capabilities
Marketing Cloud’s comprehensiveness as a one-stop-platform comes from a long list of dedicated, special-purpose studios for MarketingOps like Advertising Studio, Social Studio, and many more.
The Marketing Cloud is apt for capturing customer journey interactions, whereas Pardot has mature capabilities for concern lead management.
Pardot works enticingly when integrated with Sales Cloud. It has nothing to do with Marketing Cloud once the Pardot is amalgamated with it.
While the Marketing cloud works independently without being connected to any other portal, in the case of Pardot, a valid Salesforce Platform license is a prerequisite to enable Pardot.
However, Platform Integrations Supported by Pardot do Include
The Marketing Cloud’s ability to perform comes up in quite diversified form comprising several modules and each module works independently taking into account the service provided in digital marketing. MC services like Email Sudio, Mobile Studio, Web Studio, Content Builder, analytics builder have eased the working process by fostering hassle-free collaboration and efficient customer management. Further, they’ve cut down excessive navigation and complicated toolchains associated with creating and managing the SMS campaigns
As a constructive tool, Pardot helps you exclusively with the processes, involving effective nurturing of leads. It facilitates the cleaning of your sales pipeline to steer clear of the unresponsive leads and sets up another pipeline for the hot leads.
Despite similar email services provided by Marketing Cloud, Pardot focuses on a more extensive email marketing approach creating special drip campaigns. These drip campaigns help you in the services offered to the customers and easy tracking of relevant data gathered through website interactions. In addition, it helps in scoring and qualifying the lead on a priority basis and updates with the customers regularly.
1. Lead management.
Generation of new clients through different Marketing Campaigns.
2. Lead generation.
Initiation of consumer interest towards products or services of businesses.
3. Email marketing.
Sending messages to customers based on their interests and choices through Email.
4. Automated engagements.
It is a method of engagement offering services or products to customers throughout a purchasing & usage lifecycle.
5. Personalized messaging.
Depending on the customer’s interest and choice sending them the messages related to products like discounts, sales, and more. These are send based on customers Age, Gender and Geographic location also.
6. Optimized sending.
Sending Emails or Messages at an optimum time. Optimum time is when the customer will view the message or open their mail to check.
7. Sales alignment.
In this marketers generate leads for sales to create opportunities and turn sales into revenues.
It’s quite evident that the marketing cloud is the best bet for the business ventures to easily engage with the customers, across different channels and aid in their customer journey. On the other hand, Pardot is the weapon of choice to efficiently manage and nurture leads by narrowing down the gaps between sales and marketing employees/teams. Products striving for high value and long term nurturing can be easily dealt with through Pardot.
