With over 150,000 customers around the world, Salesforce is the face of sales SaaS applications with all-round features that today encompass many aspects of marketing as well.
Being such an amazing company, we at Trymata also wanted to check if users find the usability of their features just as good as the wide list of features it offers.
So we hired a bunch of testers on our UX testing platform and ran a test for Salesforce where we assessed usability and the time it took for them to get day-to-day tasks done for marketing and sales operations.
Here are the tasks we listed for our testers to measure on:
Salesforce user experience (UX) review
We asked UX testers to do the following activities and give us a score card:
- Signup for the free trial account
- Explore the dashboard and its functionalities
- Add an external sales lead into the platform
- Bulk import existing contacts
- Sending out marketing email to contacts
- Integration with other marketing platforms
The User Experience Test Report
Task 1. Free trial signup
Score for usability: 6.67
Score for duration: 1:47
Score for completion: 100%
Salesforce scored well for the first task with a 6.67 usability score. The task was completed within 1:47 mins with all test users submitting successful completions.
Task 2. Dashboard exploration
Score for usability: 6.0
Score for duration: 2:29
Score for completion: 100%
This task was fairly easy, although UX wise it scored slightly less than a simple signup in the previous round. There were some reservations among testers on immediate clarity, with indications that the dashboard could be made easier for first time users to explore.
Task 3. Ease of uploading existing sales leads
Score for usability: 5.00
Score for duration: 2:50
Score for completion: 100%
All testers were able to successfully upload one sales lead as instructed. However, in this task usability score declined considerably with the increased complexity of this task. The amount of time it took was quite average at 2:50 mins.
Task 4. Bulk upload company contacts
Score for usability: 6.67
Score for duration: 1:23
Score for completion: 100%
This task went as smoothly as the first task, despite the complexity, with a usability score of 6.67. Surprisingly, this rather sophisticated task took test users the least time to complete among all tasks, with a 100% completion as well.
Task 5: Sending out marketing emails to uploaded contacts
Score for usability: 2.00
Score for duration: 4:10
Score for completion: 33.3%
This is the first task where both usability and completion were hit. Usability score fell to a meagre 2.00, down about 70% from other task scores. At the same time, only 1/3rd of testers could complete the task even with double the average task duration.
Task 6. Platform integration with other marketing tools
Score for usability: 3:00
Score for duration: 3:03
Score for completion: 33.3%
While there was some improvement compared to sending email to contacts, this task was also limited to 1/3rd the completion rate with relatively much low usability.
Conclusion
Salesforce scored well overall, however when it comes to complex marketing and sales operations, clearly it is not what we would call fully DIY. Some help and support is required to get on boarded and accustomed to the daily tools.