Salesforce Engage Desktop + Mobile App

Redesigning Salesforce Engage's desktop experience across Alerts, Campaigns, and Reports, and expanding it to a mobile app so sales reps could stay connected to their prospects wherever they were working.

The setup

Sales teams move fast. They're on calls, in meetings, on the road, and constantly switching between tools. Salesforce Engage was built to give them a smarter way to work, connecting marketing-approved content, real-time prospect alerts, and email campaigns directly inside Salesforce so sales reps could act on the right information at the right moment.

The product had launched. Customers were using it. But the feedback coming back from the field was clear: the tool had the right ideas but the wrong execution. Data was overwhelming instead of actionable. Key workflows were missing. And sales reps who spent half their time away from their desks had no way to access any of it on the go.

I was brought in as the UX Designer to fix it, working alongside a dedicated UX researcher and a Product Manager to redesign the experience across both desktop and mobile.

What was broken

Three distinct problems had emerged from early customer feedback on the desktop app.

The first was information overload. Engage Alerts surfaced real-time prospect activity, which was the core value of the product. But the volume of data was overwhelming rather than useful. Sales reps couldn't filter what they saw, so everything competed for attention and nothing stood out.

The second was a missing workflow. Sales Development Representatives often needed to send emails on behalf of the Account Executives they supported, but the app didn't support it. It was a fundamental gap for how sales teams actually worked.

The third was reporting that didn't match reality. Sales cycles can span months. The existing reporting only covered 7, 14, and 30-day windows, which made it nearly useless for understanding long-term performance. Sales managers also had no visibility into team-level adoption and ROI.

On top of all of this, the entire product was desktop-only. A significant portion of sales reps worked on the road and had no access to Engage alerts, campaigns, or any feature while away from their desks.

Getting closer to the problem

We invested heavily in research before touching a single design. My UX researcher organized onsite visits with three customer companies, where we spent time in their actual offices watching how sales teams worked day to day. Nothing beats seeing users in their environment. We came away with a clear picture of how busy and time-pressured these teams were, and how much "time is money" shaped every decision they made.

We followed the onsite visits with moderated research sessions, ten participants for the desktop features and twenty for mobile, presenting design concepts and gathering direct feedback on whether our direction was solving the right problems.

The most surprising insight came from reports. We had assumed data visualizations would be well received. Users pushed back hard, with one participant putting it plainly: pie charts were eye candy they had no use for. They wanted tables, because tables contained the data they needed to make decisions quickly.

I also led cross-functional sessions using journey mapping and empathy maps to make sure the team had a shared understanding of who we were designing for before we started building.

What I built, and why

For the desktop redesign, I worked across three phases.

Phase One was Alerts. I redesigned the experience around a cleaner column layout and introduced extensive filtering controls so sales reps could configure their alerts to show only what was relevant to them. The goal was turning a firehose into a focused signal.

Phase Two was Campaigns. I built out the ability to create, save, and search marketing-approved email templates, added the ability to send on behalf of other team members, and introduced email preview so reps could see exactly what a recipient would see before sending. Campaigns also became accessible directly from Gmail and Outlook.

Phase Three was Reports. Based directly on what users told us in research, I designed a table-first reporting experience that extended time ranges to match real sales cycles. Sales managers got team-level reporting with visibility into adoption, performance by rep, and which templates were driving the best results.

For mobile, I designed the Salesforce Engage app for Salesforce1, giving sales reps on the road access to real-time Engage Alerts, the ability to add leads to nurture campaigns, and call and email features, all from their phone. I also created tablet views and built mobile prototypes that were used in Dreamforce marketing presentations.

While designing the expanded alert detail view, I discovered the Lightning Design System didn't have an activity timeline component. I designed the Activity Timeline from scratch in collaboration with the Salesforce design system team, and it has been adopted broadly across Salesforce products.

What it took to ship it

Four months, three desktop phases, and a full mobile app. I worked closely with a UX researcher, ran cross-functional design sessions with stakeholders, participated in UAT sessions, and analyzed A/B testing results to refine the experience after launch.

The onsite research was the foundation everything else was built on. It gave the team a shared, grounded understanding of what sales reps actually needed that no amount of internal discussion could have produced.

What changed

Challenges