How to Collect Feedback by Leveraging the SLDS In App Feedback Guidelines

As an admin, you’re always finding new ways to improve the user experience — but how do you know what’s actually working? Feedback loops between you and your users can help to ensure that your Salesforce implementation best meets your users’ needs while also serving your company’s business goals. One way to accomplish this is to bring the voice of your users into the design process. This will help boost adoption and encourage a more collaborative approach to your Salesforce implementation. Tracking trends on how your users feel about new features or changes in your implementation against business goals can help to inform new changes and ensure your implementation is aligned with the business. So, how do you collect this valuable feedback?

Drumroll, please… We’re excited to introduce the brand new In App Feedback Guidelines on the Salesforce Lightning Design System (SLDS)! The In App Feedback Guidelines provide you with design, research, and implementation strategies for effectively collecting feedback from your users right in the Lightning Experience.

Where do I start?

An effective feedback mechanism always starts with a research question. What do you want to know from your users? Do you have a general question about their Salesforce journey or do you want to specifically hear about their experience using a new feature or change you implemented? For example, let’s say you just rolled out a brand new page layout but you’re not sure how users are responding to it. You might want to know, what challenges are users facing with the new layout? Are users more productive? Would they change anything? Capturing these answers can help to inform improvements, track trends in how changes impact productivity and business goals, and, ultimately, ensure your end users are as successful as possible using Salesforce.

While this is just one example of a research question, the In App Feedback Guidelines provide strategy and guidance for many different types of research objectives. The variance in components and patterns enables you to customize your component to your needs and capture the most meaningful data from your users.

Once you’ve aligned on what you’re trying to learn from your users, you’re ready to start designing your custom feedback component. Different factors will influence your design process, such as how you intend to use the feedback you collect and whether or not you want the mechanism to persist over a long period of time in your org. The guidelines will help you plan the scope of your project before you start building.

Designing and building a feedback mechanism

We know that, as an admin, you make tweaks often, and the questions you might want to ask evolve quickly. That’s why we’ve made the guidelines flexible and customizable. You’ll find many different UI elements that you can include in your feedback component, such as star rating elements, radio-button groups, multi-choice checkboxes, and more. Different combinations of these elements will produce different datasets that you can analyze, and some combinations are more effective than others for specific research questions.

The final piece of the guidelines incorporates best practices for these UI patterns and how to pair questions with the right UI elements and component blueprints. Once you’ve designed your component, you’re ready to put it all together in a custom Lightning Component. New to Lightning Components? Check out this past Dreamforce talk to learn how to build custom Lightning Components that leverage the Salesforce Lightning Design System.

Storing feedback in Salesforce

Before you launch your mechanism, you’ll need to create a new custom object to store user feedback. Create fields that align with the mechanism you’ve designed so feedback can be easily parsed and analyzed. In the guidelines, you’ll find recommendations for which types of components to use to make analysis easier. For example, using predefined option choices or rating scale components can ease the analysis process compared to an open text box, since you can quantify the responses rather than having to read through each response to be able to pull out a trend.

Once you’ve built your component and have it all linked up to your new custom Feedback object, you’re ready to collect feedback!

Using feedback to drive adoption, productivity, and success

One of the biggest benefits of collecting In App Feedback is the ability to hear from more users than you would be able to through a focus group or team meeting. However, the volume of responses may make analysis seem overwhelming. Leverage reports and dashboards to ensure feedback is heard and acted upon.

At Salesforce, we built an In App Feedback mechanism to measure Net Promoter Score and gather feedback from our users. You may have seen this mechanism pop up in the Lightning Experience in the past! All of the feedback we gather is stored in a dashboard built using Tableau CRM. Filters and controls in the dashboard help us to discover trends in topics and understand which issues are most prevalent for our user base. This then focuses the conversations we have with product managers and executives on the improvements in features and functionality that will benefit our users the most.

When deploying your mechanism, have a dashboard or report ready to go so you can begin to take action on the feedback you gather and spot trends quickly. Leverage the power of Tableau CRM to analyze feedback, share different views with stakeholders, and drive your users’ success.

And that’s a wrap! Just a few simple ways to get started with In App Feedback and build stronger relationships with your users and customers.

For a related hands-on learning experience that will help you leverage relationship design principles, master feedback, and build incredible experiences that will help drive adoption and delight your users, join our #BeAnInnovator with Design journey.

Resources

• Salesforce Lightning Design System Guidelines