Salesforce Certified User Experience Designer Tips(SP21)

My experience and tips for SF UX Designer certification.

This certification would be helpful for not just the people who are into UI designing in Salesforce but also for employees who are part of product designing team. For example : Charts which are frequently used in reports and dashboards, but which type of chart should be chosen as per the data sets is also equally important. It would benefit them to fine tune the various accessibility points which would make the interactive experience of the user much more better and fluid. Another quick example would be how can we use the different types of prompts in Salesforce to get user feedback in such a way that it doesn’t feel intrusive. There are many such knowledge nuggets which you will come across, while preparing for this exam.

First and foremost start with the trailmix given by Salesforce. Go through the exam guide as well to get a gist of the exam.

Section wise overview ( From highest weightage to the lowest)-

(1) Declarative Design (27%) :

1] Read about the basic Setup and Custom objects, custom fields creation, and configuration. This requires a basic level of knowledge about configurations, which are usually covered in App Builder exam.

2] Read about the customizations options and various modules which are covered under this section.

3] Try to read or at least glance through the Resources section under: ‘User Engagement’ and ‘Lightning Experience Productivity’ modules to understand from a better perspective.

(2) Salesforce Lightning Design System (21%) :

The main portion of this section comes from the SLDS design components and guidelines. Be sure that you know about the various types of resources available on Lightning Design System. (Design guidelines, component blueprints, Utilities, etc.)
There might be some questions around the SLDS classes as well which we can apply to HTML tags. There are tons of it, but if you have enough hands-on experience with using these SLDS classes, you will be able to tackle these questions.

There is also a module for LWC, so be sure that you have basic knowledge of it.

(3) UX Fundamentals (16%) :

Apart from the trailhead modules mentioned for this section, also read about :
1] Limitations and OOTB functionalities which we have for customizing community.

2] Customization options for mobile app : Nav bar, branding colors, loading page configurations, and customization, etc.

3] For ‘Designing for Web Accessibility’ module you can refer the WCGA website and read about the topics mentioned in the various modules from this site for a better understanding.

4] For ‘App Design and Prototyping’ and ‘Demo Storytelling’ try to understand the ‘Why’ and ‘When’ to use a User Story or Storyboard or Prototype.

5] Under ‘Lightning Experience Customization’ module if you have done configurations in lighting experience, this would be a fairly easy module to tackle as well. Brush up on these topics, just in case.

(4) Discovery (13%) :

1] Read about the User Story creation and try to be in the customer's mindset. This will help you to understand it better.

2] Try to understand the concepts of Personas and Archetypes.
It's important to know how you will define the various personas and use them to your advantage for a better design.

3] Refer the personas details mentioned in the UX Personas for Salesforce module for the various clouds.

4] Rest of the modules in this section will cover most of the topics.

(5) Human-Centered Design (12%) :

Make sure to watch the videos mentioned in the ‘Embrace the Relationship Design Mindsets’ module and the rest of the modules would be sufficient to cover this section.

(6) Testing (11%) :

This section in my opinion has severely less resources to study as of now, with only two links at our disposal. You might need to study UX Testing topics on your own by searching for the topics online. The following links would be helpful to cover these topics :

• Heuristic Testing
• Inclusive Design and Accessibility
• Usability Testing Methods (this link will cover most of the testing methods, but if you have time read about them in more detail)

Misc. Topics to study :

1) Card sorting
2) Difference in Moderated User Testing and Un-moderated User Testing and when to use which method.

The topics in this exam are pretty diverse and it can get a little overwhelming at times to study all of them. To easily understand the topics, get into the mindset of the customer so that you can see things from a different perspective.

After your preparation is done, glance through the Salesforce User Experience Designer Certification Prep module for a quick revision. I tried to incorporate everything I could remember from the exam for now.

Overall its a certification which will cover design principles in areas of product development, designing Aura/LWC/ components or VF pages. Also it will cover approaches and tools needed for product development, rollout, usability testing, discovery, design, taking user feedback, user stories and process mapping to name a few !

All the best for your certification exam !