Salesforce
Automations
Designed a feature that saves hours of rework for Salesforce Admins and improves stakeholder collaboration
Role UX Research and Design
Duration 4 months
Project type Industry Sponsored Project
Team
2 Project Sponsors (Salesforce)
8 Designers
Contribution
Additional Background:
This project is sponsored by Salesforce and is for a course at my HCI masters at Indiana University.
TL;DR
Admins spent hours manually recreating workflows for stakeholders, with scattered feedback causing delays and inefficiencies in visualization and communication.
We designed one-click diagram generation and AI-powered summaries, saving admins time and making workflows easier for stakeholders to understand and engage with.
Context
What is Automation
Picture this: you sign up for a service, and seconds later, a welcome email lands in your inbox automatically. This is automation! handing off repetitive tasks like sending emails or updating records to technology, ensuring speed, consistency, and efficiency.
What does automation looks like in Salesforce
Automation workflows in Salesforce are built and managed by Salesforce Admins using Flow Builder, a powerful drag-and-drop tool.
But automation is rarely a solo effort. The process of gathering information, building workflows, and managing them is a collaborative journey. It involves multiple stakeholders, Project managers, developers and admins, clients, etc. This collaboration happens over several stages, from gathering requirements to testing, refining, and final deployment, making automation building a team effort.
High level goal
How might we make collaboration easier for Salesforce Admins and stakeholders, so they can save time and focus on building better workflows?
Research insights
09
Semi Structured Interview
03+
Rounds of User Testing
05
Collaboration Challenges
25+
Insights
Lets look at the current collaboration landscape
Collaboration in building automation workflows involves multiple stakeholders working together across different project phases. Mapping out these interaction points helps highlight the complexity and challenges of this process.
which led us to these challenges
Solution
and here's what we designed
Admins can now instantly generate a simple flowchart, edit it and share it with their clients
salesforce.flowbuilder.com
Admins can share simple flowcharts directly with clients, no need to recreate them, and gather feedback in one place
ADMIN VIEW
CLIENT VIEW
Proof of concept
But can even AI really simplify flowcharts? We tested it!
We wanted to see if AI could handle creating simple flowcharts from complex workflows, so we ran a proof of concept. The results? It worked! AI tools showed they could save admins time by generating clear, easy-to-understand diagrams without the need for manual effort.
Impact
Admins loved the features for their practicality and impact on collaboration
We conducted unstructured interviews with several Salesforce Admins to test our solution in real-world scenarios.
"It makes explaining the flow to stakeholders easier because using the actual flow as a visual aid is often too technical and hard to communicate.”
– Salesforce Admin
"The simple diagram is not just for documentation but a space where sense-making happens for admins and collaboration starts with stakeholders."
– Salesforce Admin
"Imagine spending hours recreating 500 elements in Lucidchart, and now it gets done in a single click"
– Salesforce Admin
We even got the chance to pitch to the Salesforce UX team!
We had the incredible opportunity to showcase our work to the Salesforce UX team. They appreciated how we navigated from broader goals to identifying a focused problem and designing a solution with real potential to transform collaboration.
The team recognized the professionalism of our presentation, even mentioning that it was at the level where it could be shared with Salesforce product leaders and considered for implementation.
View Presentation
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Reflection
Here’s what I learned through this journey
Adapting to Real-World Constraints
I realized that industry projects don’t follow a textbook approach. I had to adapt to tight timelines, specific client needs, and work within practical limitations.
The Power of Storytelling
I learned how important it is to build a strong narrative. Whether it was teammates or stakeholders, explaining my ideas as a story helped me bring everyone on the same page.
Less Is More
I discovered the importance of narrowing focus. At first, I thought we weren’t doing enough, but testing and feedback showed me that solving one real issue well makes a bigger impact.