Sharing the “Home Office” in 2020
As March 2020 stay-at-home orders started, our homes began sectioning off space for the classroom and office. Both can even share the same room, for those living in cities. Working for an enterprise cloud software company is not easily explained to a multigenerational household, or even a roommate at times. So a group of designers decided to take on an interesting side challenge to help Salesforce employees garner respect for their jobs from those they live with. First starting with the simple question:
How can you have empathy for something you don’t understand?
It’s a lot harder to explain to a kid what it means to work for an enterprise software company than it is to explain what doctors do at a hospital, or firefighters do with a fire truck. So, we looked to design as a way to help bridge that gap.
The designers who teamed up on this challenge work on a human-centered design thinking team called Ignite. Ignite is a customer-facing innovation team that includes designers, researchers, and strategists. We help some of our most strategic customers accomplish their large scale digital transformation goals. At Salesforce, we often use demonstrations to showcase the capabilities of our products. This helps us show how our solutions impact peoples’ everyday lives through the use of “personas” (characters that represent a specific kind of user). Demos are done using various methods of storytelling to accomplish this task.
The Ignite team is focused on understanding what challenges people face first, then demonstrating what the solution capabilities might solve for. This human-centered focus in design is known by many as “design thinking” and is the foundation of Ignite’s methodology. Breaking down complex problems to push through ambiguity is the real power of design thinking. When we’re working with customers, our methods can result in presentations that are very similar to interactive children’s shows. We’re teaching by doing. We realized we could use this practice to help our families and roommates better understand our work.
It wasn’t hard to convince a few team members to repurpose some of their past materials into learning content. Most of our contributors on this project have led similar sessions about visualizing your thinking, including at Dreamforce, our largest annual event. Through these sessions we have found that keeping art simple, even as simple as a stick figure, encourages the audience to use more of their imagination and to see a bit of themselves in a character. We used this approach of simplified visual storytelling to achieve our goal of educating friends and loved ones of all ages about how we approach selling at Salesforce.
One of our biggest challenges was to make it interesting for kids as young as five, as well as teenagers, and even a few spouses. We also wanted it to be helpful for Salesforce employees looking to add some creativity to their work while they were stuck at home. Each lesson plan was designed to both build on the previous session and stand on its own, so that anyone could follow along.
Lesson 1
Ben Hastings from the Central/East design team for Ignite, helped put together the first session about character design. His lesson emphasized techniques that add elements of expression and motion to character sketches. When a six year old participant asked Ben to show us how to draw a superhero, not only did he make it simple, he gave the superhero a cape and had him flying. This simple change allowed for us to see the character expressing themselves and their action.
Lesson 2
Justin Rheinfrank, lead for the West Coast design team for Ignite, designed a lesson that added a focus on techniques to draw objects and environments. These techniques help to ground character sketches in dimensional space. The way Justin was able to explain proportions and dimension gave the learners a sense of where our characters were and what they were interacting with.
Lesson 3
Dave VandenBranden, a designer and educator from the Central/East design team for Ignite, created a very hands-on lesson for older kids who were able to use a more advanced tablet drawing program and adults. He taught everyone how to draw higher fidelity characters by leveraging tracing techniques using digital tools. This lesson was a bit more challenging, but super rewarding, as it offered the opportunity to bypass “drawing” and still get custom persona characters, as long as you have colleagues or family willing to pose for a picture, to use as the base.
Lesson 4
This lesson (taught by yours truly) brought all of these creative skills together to build out a story. I used two of our favorite innovation workshop activities, “crazy 8’s” combined with Pixar’s story spine structure. Together, the participants and I created a story with all of our newly acquired drawing skills. We studied a couple fan favorite kid movies and then applied it to our own storyboard. Our story was about a kid stuck in an elevator chasing after his lost puppy, who learned he wants to become an engineer and build flying elevators! #imagination
Lesson 5
Joy Zhu, a designer from the West coast design team for Ignite, created a bonus lesson a few weeks after Lesson 4. The idea was to show how we’re using our virtual collaboration tools. Using Miro, we brought our stories to life in an interactive world. The inspiration came from the heightened attention around Animal Crossing and we created interactive missions. This was effective at demonstrating the capabilities of Miro, through an interactive and fun learning environment.
One of the most rewarding parts of putting this together was seeing kids look up at their parents, my Salesforce colleagues, with a deeper understanding and respect for the work they do. It was also gratifying to see how many colleagues enjoyed these sessions for themselves.
The world is more physically disconnected than any other time in history. Teaming up with the Salesforce creative community to engage our family and roommates in our work with the creative storytelling practices we use every day demonstrates the importance of empathy. The year 2020 may be many things, for me it has been a true testament to teamwork.
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Thank you Leyla Farah for your encouragement and support.
Thank you Madeline Davis for editorial guidance.
Learn more about Ignite at salesforce.com/ignite
Check out Ignite’s resources at salesforce.com/workdifferently
Learn more about Salesforce Design at design.salesforce.com
Follow us on Twitter at @SalesforceUX.
