CRAP — It’s not what you think!

Author: Claire Richard

One of the reasons why I love being a Salesforce Consultant is that my workday consists of building a better online workplace for companies and people alike. We spend so much of our time working, we had better enjoy it, or at the very least, we should take advantage of systems in place that can push our productivity to new levels!

Even though I started blazing my Salesforce trail not so long ago, I tend to take for granted what Salesforce has to offer to its users. It can be easy to forget that computing and IT skills aren’t that obvious for everyone. Keeping up with the times and choosing a new software or a new CRM can be daunting for companies and individuals.

The virtual Salesforce Dreamforce 2020 was the occasion for me to take a step back, back in the shoes of a first-timer. Here is what I learnt:

Firstly, the 5 reasons digital transformation fail session reminded me of the actual challenges and risks, and causes of failure in digital transformation. Knowing the issue is half the healing, right? The causes of failure identified were the lack of innovation, difficulty to change habits, the inability to drive change, and slow delivery capabilities. Last but not least, a pre-digital culture: IT evolution is a fast paced industry, and that can make user adoption challenging. This leads to my second Dreamforce session:

6 Guiding Principles to Maximise CRM Adoption. A 20 minutes session filled with tips on change management. What are the solutions to drive user adoption? Preparing a change management plan, having leaders who set an example, keeping to simplicity and avoiding redundancy, know your end-users and train them…

And finally, my favourite, Designing Beautiful Analytics & Dashboards session established again how much design and UI (user interface) are important. Since I watched this TedTalk on The Beauty of Data Visualisation from David McCandless, I totally love these concepts. Translating back to Salesforce, I really enjoy branding and shaping things nicely, not only so that they are visually appealing, but so users want to utilise the tool and get back to it. I want them to find what they are looking for quickly and easily without even being aware they were looking for something in the first place. In this session, the subject was specific to reports and dashboards — but I believe this is applicable everywhere — and an interesting idea I learnt about was the CRAP concept: Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity.

Hope to meet you soon, so I can build some CRAP dashboards for you!

Originally Published: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/crap-its-what-you-think-claire-richard/?trackingId=Q4m09uURGYezKKQvapLKag%3D%3D