Dreamforce '16

Problem Statement, Roles and Responsibilities

Help bring the magic of Dreamforce and the 'ohana' spirit to the world... in under five months.

We were set to rock Dreamforce 2016 as hard as we rocked Dreamforce 2015! however, this year we had a brand new wrinkle.

Instead of working in Open CMS, we had AEM, brand new platform, to learn as we built out our new site. We had no existing components, no existing UX /UI elements.

Unlike previous years, we were building this house form scratch... with a brand new team of devs. This year I was well acquainted entire front and back end dev team, and I kept them and all of our stakeholder involved in our design process from day 1.

The Dreamforce team is always about clear, open collaboration. I was excited as this year i was the only designer for the most important site for all of Salesforce.

The previous year I had a team working with me on creating the UX wires, this year I was on my own, and with several new and interesting constraints. The most challenging was, for the first time ever, Dreamforce was going to sell out!

Visual Overview

A few screens (that Im allowed to show) from the process

Overview of Process

Our scrappy team had 90 days to bring the magic of Dreamforce to millions of people world wide. I had all of the research and context for the site from my work on it the previous year, but that was only going to be limited use.

We had made the choice to transition to AEM. This was a new system I had no previous knowledge about. I had to work closely with the dev team to learn about the system, its limitations, and its features.

We worked closely together for a few weeks to design with the dev team, and have them provide direct and live feedback to the work I was producing.

We learned that many of the modules and features we had created in previous years were not going to be feasible in AEM. Which mad me running a ton of designs very quickly.

We were also up against a slew of changes that needed to be made. The registration flow this year was going to need a major overhaul to make the process quicker and easier.

The video section needed to be overhauled to provide an easier viewing experience across multiple live channels, the keynotes page needed to provide more prominence to the videos, and various other modules needed small refreshes from the previous year.

With only a few weeks to dev, we thought we had everything settled... that was until we had a "fire drill" request come it.

The site's during-conference landing page had to be scrapped and redesigned to fit with the new "Trailhead / Lighting / Trailblazer" theme. It was a full redesign of the landing page, which forced us to redesign the video player

The new wrinkle in the reg process, selling out, was going to make a lot of conference goers very upset. We had to figure out a way to give users a gentile notice that they were not going to get into Dreamforce.

I came up with a simple solution that all the business stakeholders loved. We would open up a waitlist. Now the win / win on this list would be that we would be able to collect more leads, and also give people an action to complete so they felt connected to the event.

I was turning around frames in 2 day sprints, and working directly with the Dev and design teams to make sure that interactions and designs were being created on a parallel paths. It was rough, but in the end it turned out to be one of the best websites we ever had.

Outcomes and Reflections

Dreamforce 2019 was simple, quick, and not too hard. Thankfully, this year I was prepared for the state changes, so I knew what was coming.

I had all of the state changes Identified and sketched out so that the Dreamforce group could ideate together and make a stronger site.

The simplified video page, login, reg flow and sell out pages were a huge success. The idea to add a "waiting list" for Dreamforce tickets helped to calm people down and also provide Salesforce with a ton of new leads.

While the process was nowhere perfect, it was successful through the quick collaboration between myself, the dev, the PMs and the business partners. I couldn't have asked for a better team.