One of the wonderful breakout sessions I attended at Northeast Dreamin’ 2023 last week was by Daniel Gorton. His session was called, “Delivering Empathic and Joyful User Experiences”.
Being UX certified myself, I was drawn to the words “empathic” and “joyful”. It’s not often enough to hear these words in the same sentence as UX, so I wanted to hear what he had to say.
Here are the ways Daniel believes we should be designing Salesforce in order to incorporate these two themes.
Empathy: This means understanding our client’s human needs, feelings, and goals.
To achieve this,
- Build collaborative working partnerships, as it’s easier to solve a problem as a team
- Be aware that users have many roles, so they need to know which hat they need to wear at which time
- Help them navigate technology changes, since they aren’t ever going to be as tech savvy as you are
- Stay humble and curious, so you don’t become arrogant and a “know-it-all”
- Keep in mind our users can teach us too, as sometimes the student can educate the professor
- Don’t neglect your own self-care, so you don’t burn yourself out in the process of delivering a project
Joyful: This means to delight our end users so they have more time for their talents.
To achieve this,
- Add value to make your client’s lives better, and don’t forget why you’re helping them in the first place
- Provide good surprises to delight them
- Be intuitive, so they don’t need to overuse their memory and feel stupid
- Have a reasonable amount of clicks, so they don’t get frustrated so too many steps
- Provide helpful guidance & feedback along the way, so they know where to go for help
- Make it fun & empowering, because at the end of the day, why shouldn’t work also be fun?!
The takeaway
These guidelines are a great starting point for building an empath and joyful user experience. They provide positive goals to aim towards in order to deliver a well-rounded project.