Mia, a custom ui for salesforce

Intro:

Established in 1883, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, now Mia, is a fine art museum in Minneapolis, MN, with a vast and diverse collection of over 89,000 artworks from six continents spanning 20,000 years. As a publically funded museum, Mia does not charge an entrance fee to enjoy its 150,000 square feet of gallery space. Although it’s technically free, the only way they stay open is from donations from patrons and corporations.

The Users:

Amanda and Shenada work for Mia on the Advancement team. as a data entry specialist for Mia.

processing and tracking those donations. This is done across teams in various forms but today I will be focusing on the Advancement team. The two main users on this team are named Amanda, the Salesforce admin and Shenada who works as a data entry specialist.

Business Objectives

Going into the project we had a stakeholder meeting with Mia’s developers. They asked for the fundraising associates to have the existing system be evaluated. It is their understanding that there is room for improvement through a re-designed interface- thus improving efficiency and resulting in a streamlined process.

My main questions right away were:

• What are the main users looking to solve?

• In what context/environment are they working in?

• What are the current pain points?

• Are there mistakes currently made, because of the process in place now?

• How is this information being used within the CRM system as a whole?

The Process

I started with a multi-pronged research approach. Extensive user interviews and contextual inquiries periodically throughout the development of the feature—helped paint a detailed picture of how they solicit, capture, and process the gifts they receive from their constituents. Surveys fleshed out our view of what systems they currently used for these processes, their individual technical proficiency, and how their approach correlated with the size of the organizations in which they operated.

I synthesized this information into a sketch diagram to visualize what was happening. There were a few key takeaways from the research.

Because of the constraints with audits and how they have to use the funds, that means they have to enter in gift data entry manually. It is important to enter data while maintaining its accuracy and preventing duplicate records from accumulating.
They work as a team to capture this data, Shenada enters in the compiled list of gift data to the organization. This info still has to be manually reviewed for accuracy and de-duplication, so they still needed an interface that would allow importing, reviewing, and correcting the data.
Salesforce’s existing data import and entry tools have constraints for capturing gift data (which includes information that would span many different Salesforce data tables). As a result, they used Appsona to enter in this information.

**How they currently enter in Gift Entries**

Feature Cards

After evaluating their system, I wanted to make sure that the features I designed for the advancement team would be functional with their current workflow. To accomplish that, I did a remote usability test. I gained significant insight into how they would or would not be able to use these functions.

The Aha Moment

I ecause of the nature of the job, each of the batch entries have to be manually because of the unique constraints and regulations they have to follow (the need of a paper-trail in case of audits, and recording certain processes for tax reasons).

Although there is not many opportunities to increase efficiencies in their current process, I had an “aha” moment where I was able to solve for many pain-points.

Custom Dashboard

One overlapping theme I discovered, is that the advancement team often did many tasks in bulk. Although efficient, this means the users would get pulled away from their desks at times, being forced to leave in the middle of a task. This gave me the opportunity to integrate a custom dashboard, showing where they were in many processes they encounter through the day

Next Steps

Developers at the Mia are going to develop take this dashboard under consideration in order to increase the workflow for the gift advancement team. Usability testing is needed to make sure that the dashboard provides support when interrupted during the day.