Research and Content Audit to Deflect Cases
Problem
Customers struggle to include database queries in interactive dashboard widgets due to hard-to-find documentation, outdated content, and overall complicated functionality. As the database query language writer, I identified these issues when I learned that writing queries for interactive widgets was the number support case driver. This feature is key to designing dashboards in Salesforce’s Analytics product. If a customer can’t create their desired bar graph, table, or chart to display data, they could leave the Salesforce ecosystem—a potential source of difficulty for the customer, and a user retention issue for the company.
Scope
Audit trainings, video, documentation, and in-app help to identify limitations and terminology inconsistencies—sources of customer confusion.
Move widgets documentation to a more visible place in our documentation structure and reference it in the language reference.
Create examples based on customer usage—both superusers and beginners.
Stakeholders
Support, engineering, product management
Solution
Increased cross-team visibility by working with support, pre-sales engineering, solutions engineering, and an expert Salesforce consultant in order to avoid duplicating efforts and increase the consistency of our user experience. Together, we discussed common questions and agreed on the gaps in understanding.
Repurposed must-have examples from the Salesforce consultant’s blog posts to use in documentation (in progress).
Successfully handed off content audit to another writer after I was reorged to another team. The writer has since migrated the docs to our developer site where customers can easily find them.
The above UI can’t be redesigned due to other priorities. Product management and engineering agree it needs a redesign and it is on the query language PM’s backlog. The product manager behind the original design admitted even he has trouble with the editor.
A few suggestions for how to improve the current design with text:
Clarify the relationship between the menu on the left and the main text editor. Rename the “Created Interaction” label “Interaction Selections” to indicate that this section of the screen shows the results from the left menu choices. Clarify the relationship between Created Interaction and Interaction Result beneath it.
Create an empty state for “Created Interaction”: “You haven’t created an interaction yet. To get started, select Source Data and an Interaction Type. You’ll see the result here.”
Simplify infobubble text. Under Interaction Type, the Result infobubble says: “Results interactions are based on the entire result of the query.” “Entire result” is unclear. Replace with: “This type of interaction occurs when the query returns a new value.” For Selection, can add, “This type of interaction occurs when a user clicks.”
Include in-app guidance, such as a walkthrough to show what happens when you paste a query written in the Salesforce proprietary query language into the Query section of the Advanced Interaction Editor. The main way that a customer uses the editor is missing from the UI.
Content Audit
Interactive widgets documentation live on the highly-visible developer documentation site, where executives want to see more content.