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GE has an incredibly complex Salesforce Licensing landscape. With dozens of Salesforce orgs used across several business and sub-business units. The company needed a solution to be able to see the number of licenses being utilized at a given point in time specifically when it came to transferring unused licenses from org to org.

My Role in this project was to work with CIOs and other stakeholders to build a solution to this problem. I was the lead UX designer and worked on prototyping and user testing. I acted as a Product Owner; working to filter requirements down from CIOs level stakeholders at GE and lead an Agile team of Salesforce developers to architect and build the solution on the Salesforce Lightning Platform.

The problem

  • Over reliance on Excel Files

  • No formalized process for requesting licenses and tracking transfers

  • No real-time visibility into license usage

Salesforce is among one of GE's largest vendors. As a result, Salesforce is used heavily across the company and nearly all of GE's primary business units has a Salesforce org and among the larger business units like GE Aviation and GE Power, each of their major sub-business also utilizes their own Salesforce org.

In total, there are over four dozen active Salesforce orgs across GE with thousands of active users and licenses being consumed. The existing process for keeping track of license usage and managing transfers was to store everything inside of large and complicated spreadsheets. With the financial consequence at stake in the event of an error, it was imperative to build a more sustainable solution.

An example of the complicated Excel sheets being used to track license quantities and transfers

 

defining personas

It was important for me to first understand the stakeholders involved in this process. This exercise involved conducting over a dozen interviews with individuals in the company familiar with the existing process of requesting Salesforce License transfers.

From the interviews, I condensed the data points and the requirements we gathered to three main personas: A Corporate Utility Administrator, a GE Business IT representative, and a GE Business IT leader (CIO level executive).

Each has distinct needs and roles and this helped tremendously in defining permission sets when we built the application.

 

Defining the workflow

Dividing the transfer process into a swim lane diagram where personas are kept separate helped us determine what to build into our application and at what point people and technology would be interacting with each other

Illustrating the License Transfer in an end-to-end state like this helped us focus and zone in on only the most essential features we wanted to build into our application. We also had a much clearer and defined picture of how our different personas would be interacting with each other and with the technology.

 

Building the tool

We decided to build our tool on-top of Salesforce for several reasons. While, Salesforce is somewhat limited in the ability to create a wholly customized interface, it did come with several significant benefits:

  • Performance

  • End user and developer familiarity

  • Integration compatibility

We had scoped and piloted a third party tool for Salesforce License control in the form of a Javascript web application and came away less than impressed. We had an enormous set of data to load into the application and were running into frequent crashes and defects, which in turn lead to poor reporting and inaccurate data.

 

Prototyping & Iteration

Prototyping the License Request record management was the most important workflow to illustrate and build in MVP 1. Starting with pen and paper sketches and then creating interactive mock-ups helped determine the key fields and interactions we wanted to capture in MVP 1. What I wanted to be able to deliver to users was a replacement for work being done on Excel sheets with important improvements made in ease-of-use.

Early Stage Sketches

Early stage sketch with user needs, constraints and key fields highlighted. Proposal recommended that remaining licenses be displayed as roll-up summary text fields.

Second iteration sketch proposing that remaining licenses be displayed as an interactive dashboard with filters for business units and license type.

 

Wireframe and Mockups

Early stage wireframe of License Request record page.

Wireframe showing source record breakdown.

 

Interactive Prototype

Early stage interactive prototype created with elements from the Salesforce Lightning Design System

 

User TEsting results

We made extensive use of Salesforce Sandboxes to conduct initial user testing. Building our application in Salesforce Lightning meant that we could do rapid page layout deployments, user testing and iterations because of the robust page builder tools available. Below are some examples of feedback we received from users then worked on improving in later iterations.

User Guidance

Enabling Path Guidance - User testing indicated that it was not intuitive what fields needed to be filled in on a record page. The path component let us create a guided journey for the user.

Enabling Path Guidance - User testing indicated that it was not intuitive what fields needed to be filled in on a record page. The path component let us create a guided journey for the user.

Repositioning Analytics Report

Analytics Report was initial positioned below data fields. Doing so occupied a significant amount of vertical space.

Through testing we found users were scrolling excessively to see the Analytics report chart. We relocated the chart to a separate tab. Doing so, save vertical real estate and hid the chart when it wasn’t needed in later stages of the record life-cycle.

 

Efficient Bulk Record Creation

Initial out of the box modal was inefficient for creating multiple License Source records

Creating multiple source records was a time consuming process that involved users having to go through multiple modal screens. With the bulk creator, users can immediately allocate the number of source records they want to create with only the key fields visible.

 

SEMI-Finalized License Source Allocation Workflow

Reducing steps for users - We utilized dynamic filters to automatically pre-filter our Analytics Report for just the relevant License Type. Instead of having to go through multiple modal screens when creating multiple license sources, we designed an…

Reducing steps for users - We utilized dynamic filters to automatically pre-filter our Analytics Report for just the relevant License Type. Instead of having to go through multiple modal screens when creating multiple license sources, we designed and built a custom component to bulk create license source records.

 

final page layouts

Below are the final screens that shipped to users in Production for MVP 1.

Home Screen

Shipped MVP 1 Homepage - Puts analytics for remaining licenses across the company at the forefront for the user. Also shows any open/pending license requests that require action.

Shipped MVP 1 Homepage - Puts analytics for remaining licenses across the company at the forefront for the user. Also shows any open/pending license requests that require action.

 

License Request Record Page

Shipped License Request Record Page - Lets the user perform source allocation workflow while easily maintaining the record through out its lifecycle.

Shipped License Request Record Page - Lets the user perform source allocation workflow while easily maintaining the record through out its lifecycle.

 

Account Record Page

Shipped Account Record Page - Shows license usage for a particular org and surfaces insights on user login information.