A Tell-All From Trailhead UX Designer Chris Fox
Chris Fox has worked at Trailhead for almost 2 years as a UX designer, cultivating one of Trailhead’s most important ingredients: a continuously fun learning experience for people. I recently caught up with Chris to learn more about what’s next with Trailhead and get some career tips for those looking to break into the UX field.
On the principles of Trailhead UX:
For Trailhead, the UI was always fun and straightforward and approachable, and we wanted to really maintain that more than invent anything new. So the principles at the top are: fun and guided. At its core, Trailhead is meant to run you through a trail using modules and projects as building block components of that. Creating that guidance is a big part of it and the fun was self-evident, so we kept the fun as part of (the UX).
Personalizing is another principle because Trailhead is a place where it’s about you as a learner and not about the org you belong to or the business you’re at. This is a lifelong or a career-long journey that you’re learning Salesforce. Also, the UX has to be extensible: there’s going to be more content coming all the time, so the UI needs to accommodate a rapidly expanding corpus of content to help users find what they’re looking for quickly. Lastly, the UX has to be accessible: the content has to be available on all devices for any user at any time.
On new UX trends at Salesforce:
Consumer application design is penetrating the enterprise and Trailhead is the vanguard of that. We tried to bring that human consumer aspect to Salesforce and it’s been wildly successful. That has everything to do with the characters the Trailhead Creative team created; the UX tries to follow that. We try to make everything big and friendly and easier to read and fun! The tone of the content really drives the UX experience. So we play off each other in that way.
On what’s next for trailmixes:
I think we can do a lot more to personalize trailmixes — we have a ton of ideas to expand social sharing beyond what we did in the first release. We thought about adding the ability to see who is watching (your trailmix), who is following it, and how many people “liked” it, and maybe a few more ideas. Our team and users have so many great ideas on this and we can’t wait to dive into it. I think that’s a place Trailhead may likely go: more robust awareness of the community, and more interaction with other learners. We’ve thought about adding Chatter feeds into challenges so users can help one another and a notification system which will let you know when someone is interacting with your trailmix content or your profile.
On advice for anyone wanting to break into the field of UX:
Be a generalist: First, you need to be able to communicate. You need to be able to write, to compose emails, to present, to craft experiences from both an interaction and visual perspective. The strongest designers I’ve ever worked with have been those who are skilled in both visual and interaction design, who care deeply about research, who understand at least some code, and who can draw from a broad range of experiences and education. While there are certainly exceptions, I tend to think people who are really strong in multiple aspects of design are the most versatile and exciting UX designers in the field.
Go to college: Don’t go to art school, go to college. Get a broad, general education, because you will be working with people from all kinds of industries and fields of study. Your job is often to communicate what they’re building or creating and communicating it to the broader public. You need to be able to speak with a scientist or a geologist and you really have to understand the way they think and what they’re passionate about. There are some rare visual geniuses who can create such visually compelling work that they can rely purely on visual skill, but those people are not common.
Be curious: It’s really hard to be a wallflower in design. You have to want to solve problems, to collaborate with everyone, to drive for solutions and facilitate discussion. UX is so often at the heart of the collaboration process. You don’t have to dominate the conversation (better if you don’t), rather you need to facilitate, encourage, and facilitate solving problems.
On debunking UX myths:
Design is a process that everyone needs to participate in. Designers are the facilitators — they’re not magicians who listen to all the input, then go behind a door and unveil! Smart people don’t want a big unveiling, they want to participate in the process, the creation. If you just drop it in their laps, they very rightly start poking holes in everything. So to think that UX is some sort of magic trick is a myth that I’ve been able to dispel on every team.
It really is at the core of it, a process. It’s all about getting everyone in a room together, asking questions, getting everyone’s ideas out — anyone can be trained to do that. You do not have to be a magician.
Want to apply some UX principles to your org? Check out Build Better with UX and learn to refine your user experience skills with these powerful tips from the Salesforce UX team.
Learn More About Chris
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