Strategic Partnership sites: Launch and ongoing additions
I craft UX & visual design for Strategic Partner platforms, including proactively designing new components and working with the development team to implement them.
How might we enable connection and collaboration between the company and its Strategic Partners to facilitate users to get up to speed on the partnership to sell and deliver client engagements while promoting events?
What
The Strategic Partners team I’m on collaborated with our company and Salesforce stakeholders to brainstorm and come up with a viable solution to this question: an event calendar.
Why
- Partners need a better way to discover connections across the two organizations, especially in lieu of a shared platform like Slack.
- The primary business goal is to strengthen partner relationships with increased transparency, shared resources and co-creation.
- The secondary business goal is to increase Partner attendance of events so Partners from both organizations are kept abreast of news, developments, etc.
Who
The target audience for these platforms is client-facing partners at both our company and its Strategic Partner. These individuals are incredibly busy and face many competing pressures.
My role
As the sole UX and visual designer for the partnership sites, I’m responsible for the end-to-end design from information architecture through high fidelity mockups and QA of the site in testing.
I also manage the constant evolution of these sites, so when it was decided to add an event calendar with search, I led the effort.
Research and discovery
I knew other calendars existed on the company's primary site (external site) and on Content+ (an internal site for Consulting), so I started this work by doing research on what existed. I don’t believe in recreating the wheel unless it can be improved, and I value the availability heuristic for ease of use.
After creating an inventory, I assessed pros and cons of each approach in terms of user value/ability to address pain points, dev lift, and ease of use for stakeholders then discussed with my team and our stakeholders.
The image is a screenshot of a Mural board where I was collecting screenshots of existing calendars across the various sites within the company.
Increasing the scope to include event pages and mapping out user flow
Initially, the plan was to create a calendar that would link to external pages containing additional info and/or event registration.
During my discussion with stakeholders, I realized that they wanted to include events on the calendar as soon as they were announced which meant that they wouldn’t always have a page to link to.
Additionally, some of the event pages that exist are designed for an external audience and don’t necessarily include info relevant to the partnership.
Example:
A joint partnership booth at a conference with information on how our company and Salesforce are going to market together with a specific Offering or solution.
Thinking through calendar search outcomes
Moving through the flow into the event page
Knowing that some event pages would live on after events - as a home for content like recordings, decks, contact info, etc. - I created template that could accommodate event information as well as multimedia. We had a similar page already that was created after the 2023 Dreamforce event.
Notes and simple wireframe of event page template for pre- and post-event use.
"I have partnered with a lot of experts in my career, and Sara has a truly unique ability to really listen to business requirements and translate them into functional digital solutions that exceed expectations. In collaborating with Sara on the Salesforce Partnership Portal, I felt heard and understood not just on a functional level, but on a strategy level."
–Salesforce Stakeholder
